TV: Doctor Who And The Curse Of The Fatal Fans

Fans – they love things, don’t they? That’s what it means to be a fan, surely?

Well yes… To an extent. But there’s more to it than that.

Fans love things in a vaguely or emphatically obsessive way (there’s definitely a spectrum). Someone who loves, for example, The Beatles isn’t necessarily someone who would spend £8,437 on John Lennon’s school dentention slips and think it a wise use of money. There are of course the other more interesting fans of The Beatles who have been inspired by them to create their own music.

 
Fans of music have this option to express their love. Countless garage bands prove it – the DIY aesthetic means that a music fan just has to pick up an instrument, learn some covers and express their fandom in an exhilarating and gratifying way, perhaps going on to create their own music and getting their own fans. That is after all how The Beatles themselves started out, doing Chuck Berry covers at the school fete.

Lovers of other things tend not to have immediate access to ways to express their inner fan. Sports fans may love their football but most know deep down that the chances are they will never play for their country. Similarly, people who are fans of Star Wars are unlikely to direct or act in the films; and fans of TV shows like Doctor Who are unlikely to produce the show.

Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat: The Fanboys That Made It...

Only that is exactly what has happened with Doctor Who since its 2005 resurrection. First Russell T Davis and now Steven Moffat, both fans of the show since childhood, have written and steered the show all the way. Not only that but another childhood fan, David Tennant got to play The Doctor and another, Peter Capaldi is just starting to have a bash himself…

This is quite a weird situation. And it is in many ways a brilliant situation. It is a good thing to know that there is Saturday family television not merely being churned out by programme monkeys to get high ratings (like the awful Robin Hood revival that began around the same time as Doctor Who came back). This is something that is being made by people who are passionate about something and want to do happy memories of their childhood justice. They care about wanting to make something good, which isn’t as common as it should be in television. And they are very talented at what they do – Russell T Davis and Steven Moffat didn’t get the job of showrunner by turning up at the BBC and waving their Doctor Who Magazine subscription at reception. They’re two of the best writers for television of the last 30-odd years, who would have been remembered for shows like Press Gang, Queer as Folk, Coupling and so forth for years even if Doctor Who was still dead and buried.


However (there was always going to be a 'however'...)

Mark Lawson mentions the writers’ fandom origins in passing in a recent review of Doctor Who and Sherlock’s recentepisodes written for The Guardian (Moffat is of course heavily involved in Sherlock, but we’ll have plenty of time to discuss that next week after the 3rd series finishes…). Most of Lawson's article is concerned with how Moffat and Mark Gatiss respond to their fans however, and this is where the danger of having fan hands at the steering wheel (or the lunatics in charge of the asylum) has the potential to be damaging. Genre fiction tends to become afflicted with continuity – that is, people start to enjoy the game of pretending that the stories are real as much (or in some cases more than) as they enjoy the stories themselves. Whole books have been devoted to putting all the Sherlock Holmes stories into chronological order, whole blog posts about UNIT Dating (if you need to ask what ‘UNIT Dating’ means you don’t want to know the answer, believe me). And fans love the continuity stuff, can’t get enough. But drama stands or falls on its ability to tell fun and engaging stories, not how well it plugs continuity holes. 

Lawson says the Doctor Who Christmas episode, ‘The Time Of The Doctor’ “included a plot twist that granted the Time Lord another dozen physical regenerations, thus resolving (at least in the minds of the producers) the problem, much discussed on fan sites, that according to the rules originally set down, the Doctor was permitted only 12 embodiments.” This is true; and it was embarrassingly pointless. It added nothing of dramatic worth to the plot of the episode. It was solving a problem that only a fraction of the audience knew existed and most of them probably weren’t particularly bothered about it being answered either, being much more concerned with what the hell was meant to be going on. And that’s just one example of many call backs to old episodes, in-jokes and so on. It’s the job of the fan and fan-fiction to worry about all these piddling little details, and the job of the writers of the BBC’s main Christmas Day event to make good drama for all the family.

But this is the problem – being a fan himself Moffat feels the need to be accountable to fandom and this is a big, big mistake. Because that’s when the programme begins to be made primarily for the fans and not the majority of the audience. He’s an excellent writer, but fan fiction’s never a pretty sight. Obsessing about essentially meaningless details gets in the way of interesting characters and things actually, you know, making sense. And that is what killed Doctor Who in the 1980s after all – the producers had spent years courting the fans at the expense of the interest of the general public; until eventually only the fans were watching and it was inevitably axed. Funnily enough, concentrating on giving a minority of obsessives what they (think they) want isn’t the recipe for a popular show.
 
The vast majority of an average Doctor Who audience are casual viewers, willing to enjoy a good story but not expecting to have more than a basic grasp of the concept of the show - and why should they? As a programme it has become too exclusive. My girlfriend likes Doctor Who to the extent that if I’m watching it she’ll watch it with me and sometimes get pretty into it, but she isn’t and never will be a fan. Recent episodes make her feel confused, left out and ultimately bored, which means that I don’t enjoy them as much either.
 
Doctor Who’s remit, right from day one, was to be accessible to everyone in the family on a Saturday in between the afternoon sport and the evening’s adult entertainment. Which is how it was for most people.  It wasn't targeted at anything as specific as sci-fi fans.  It was something you watched with your parents or children.  Fandom as a ‘thing’ didn’t happen to Doctor Who until the 1970s. Doctor Who’s ‘history’ was just whatever the writers happened to remember at the time. Then an article was published in a magazine by the Chief Head Fan of the Doctor Who Association (or whatever). It was one of Tom Baker’s most famous stories, ‘The Deadly Assassin’ – the story where the whole idea Lawson mentions about ‘The Doctor can only have 12 lives’ was introduced. The article lambasted the producers for messing up the continuity: what was all this nonsense about him only having 12 lives, how dare they? They had ruined Doctor Who! (The article's available online but it’s so excruciatingly badly written I can’t bring myself even to link to it…) So what did the producers do or say in response? Nothing whatsoever, obviously – if you’re the producer of a high profile BBC1 prime time show you don’t take shit off some guy in a bedroom, frankly. And it’s ironic to think that Steven Moffat was crowbarring in desperate dialogue at Christmas to justify some fictional facts that fandom itself had originally been dead set against.
 
Any good TV series should be able to have its premise summed up in a sentence. Doctor Who = ‘Mysterious man travels through time and space in a magic box.’ Doctor Who is by no means a failing show, it is still generally well regarded, but I think it’s time it went back to basics and stopped getting bogged down in its own mythology – and maybe aim to make some new fans as well as just pleasing the old ones.

DARFIELD

UPDATE: 31/01/2014
Have been reading some of Philip Sandifer's excellent Doctor Who blog 'TARDIS Eruditorium' again, and he says so much more about The Deadly Assassin in a better way than I ever could... http://www.philipsandifer.com/2011/11/far-more-than-just-deadly-assassin.html

MUSIC: Morrissey And Other Animals

So, everyone’s favourite misanthropic ex-singer of The Smiths has caused minor controversy with his latest statement comparing meat-eating with paedophilia.  Oh, and the holocaust.  And, only very slightly less insanely compared to those comparisons, cannibalism.  Much faux-outrage ensues (more from embarrassed veggie Morrissey fans than from offended meat-eaters).

Charming Man

Now let’s get something clear straight away – Morrissey is a clever guy and a wind up merchant.  It is extremely unlikely that he literally believes that eating meat is a crime on the same level as child abuse/murder/cannibalism.  It’s not really worth going into why meat-eating is not like raping children because that’s exactly why Morrissey says things like this. I am aware that writing a post about it is doing precisely that, but let’s sink to the bait anyway…

There’s a well-known rule for internet forums: ‘Don’t Feed The Trolls’; and trolling is exactly what Morrissey is doing here.  If someone said all these things on a chat forum you’d probably just ignore them but because he used to be in The Smiths this kind of thing gets published in The Guardian.  The thing is, Morrissey comes from a time from before the internet and the democratisation of outrage and stupidity.  His USP in the 80s was being a contrary bastard who could have a voice, but now people being contrary are two a penny.  You can piss off more people by setting up a Twitter account and being a jerk in 15 minutes than doing interviews with the NME.  And comparing things to Auschwitz for shock value?  Please, Nazi shock tactics are soooo 20^th century.

Morrissey is savvy enough to know that musically he is no longer particularly interesting except to a rabid fanbase, and that nowadays to get wider attention he has to use other methods than releasing songs.  The thing is, he’s never been a muso, he just comes from an era where the best way to be provocative – to get that voice - was to be in a guitar band.  Music has probably always been a means to an end in his mind in the same way it has been for Mark E Smith and of course, Johnny ‘Lydon’ Rotten.  Morrissey’s been in the news a few times in 2013, but how much of it was to do with his music and how much of it has been to do with his autobiography being published under the Penguin Classic imprint?

The reason why Morrissey is so infuriating is not because of what he does or says.  I think it’s perfectly valid to have our artistes behaving like dicks and being wind-up merchants, pulling stunts and playing devil’s advocate.  It’s because he seems to have so little fun when doing it, and he’s lost his sense of humour.  Either that or his sense of humour has become so dry and witty it goes above everyone’s head which makes it the same thing.  We mentioned Johnny ‘Rotten’ Lydon and contemporary, Mark E Smith – both prickly personalities with similar reputations for controversial soundbites.  So let’s compare them all and see if anything interesting happens.

Money Changes Everything

Rotten/Lydon is someone who has always made a virtue of doing whatever he feels like doing that will irritate as many people as possible.  In the 70s the best way of annoying people was to attack the establishment, but he was never really an Anarchist with a capital ‘A’; he was and is a natural force of anarchy, unpredictable and impish.  In the 21^st century he obviously thought it would be more fun annoying po-faced punks and indie snobs by selling butter and appearing on game shows.  Sources about punk – Jon Savage’s ‘England’s Dreaming’ or Julien Temple’s ‘The Filth And The Fury’ – show very clearly that Lotten essentially lost interest in punk when it stopped being about individuality and started being about having the right safety pin accessories.  He was always rebelling against having to fulfil peoples’ expectations.  Whether these expectations were those of the Establishment or his fans was irrelevant.  If anything it is more satisfying seeing middle-aged punks being incensed by Rottyn ‘selling out’ than reading about the Jubilee barge business, because it’s so much more of an individual statement to alienate people nominally on your side.  Oor Johnny never claimed to stand for anything in particular – or rather, he stood for what he believed was the truth whilst claiming that whatever he happened to be thinking at the time counted as his truth.  That’s true chaos, not some cookbook manifesto.  My Dad doesn’t like the Pistols (or PiL) for that matter but thinks Johnny’s brilliant for being a piss-taking bastard.  And being liked by peoples’ Dads is how he can achieve iconoclastic status in the 21^st century.  Unlike Morrissey, he kept with the times so that he could at the very least be relevant.

Mark E Smith on the surface has much in common with Morrissey – both misanthropic Mancunians inspired by the Sex Pistols (both at the same Free Trade Hall gig, at least according to ’24 Hour Party People’, so probably not but whatever), both very definitely ‘words’ men with little interest in musicianship (and in Smith’s case active disdain for it).  Both are control freaks although Smith is the more successful, eating through musicians like nobody’s business.  Morrissey never fully managed to dominate Marr let alone sack him (in the end it was Morrisey who was jilted); ex-members of The Fall are somewhere in the 50s by now.  And this is one of the key differences between them – Smith strives for change, and if he does revisit the past it is normally to completely revise it. 

Handsome Devil

He is an alcohol and amphetamine fuelled surrealist force, whereas Morrissey is essentially conservative, verging on puritanical.  The Fall – famously described by John Peel as “Always different, always the same” – have a fluid identity, instantly recognisable by virtue of changing direction at every availability. 

Morrissey is only recognisable by being always the same.  Both singers (and of course Jotten) have distinctive voices and humorous lyrics but whereas Morrissey’s genre is despondent music-hall, Smith’s is Dali ranting in your dodgy local, a much more interesting spectacle.  Morrissey’s best lyrics (and though this post is a bit of a hatchet job on Morrissey he has written some of the wittiest lyrics in popular music) tend towards the wry and aloof, Smith’s the accessibly incomprehensible. 

Mark E Smith’s just as capable of being unpleasant and provocative to people as Morrissey can be, but he’s also a jocular Walter Mitty barfly in Salford who still has artistic validity on his side - and so is tolerated with affection (apart from guitarists one presumes).  The reason why Rydon is quite loveable and is treated with affection is because he so obviously enjoys his role as a Puckish contrary bastard.  And the reason why Morrissey comes across as being a prick is he looks like he’s having a such a rubbish time going through the motions of being a pantomime of Morrissey.  No Lytten-like glint in the eye, no Fall-like whimsical psychosis, just supercilious misanthropy that seems as dated as shoving some daffodils up your arsenal and spinning around on Top Of The Pops.

It is perfectly permissible to be an ageing icon making bombastic, attention-seeking statements when you have something else of interest.  But seeing someone resorting to unintentional self-parody so unnecessarily is a shame.  All three of the rebellious jukebox icons we’ve looked at continue to hold our attention not so much through their music but by playing cultural court jesters (with the possible exception of Mark E Smith).  The problem is that Morrissey isn’t funny, which makes for a pretty poor jester.

Admittedly though, the fact that I went and bought his autoubiography for £1.99 on the Kindle makes me a complete sucker, and probably renders everything you have just read as completely invalid.  Sorry for wasting your time.

Everyone Is Guilty...

Agatha Christie has been something of a blind spot for me, one of the most famous writers (and probably the most famous crime writer) I had until recently never read.  So thanks go to the colleague who lent me Murder On The Express to correct this!

Murder On The Orient Express is a famous story, with a famous plot; so much so that I approached it knowing the ending. The plot has been the subject of so many homages and parodies over the years that what must have been on first publication an outstanding twist now seems almost hackneyed. This is not necessarily a criticism and could be taken as the opposite. To write something that enters the cultural consciousness to the extent that it is familiar to people who have not read it is a rare achievement.  Basically, everyone dunnit. Spoiler alert (I did that right, yeah?) It does, however, mean that reading it with fresh eyes 80 odd years later is hard; it also means that the book's main asset, it's big reveal denouement, doesn't have quite the same impact.  So what else is there? 


The premise is simple enough. There has been a murder. On the Orient Express. That's actually really all you need to know, and you probably gathered that bit already. The famed detective, Hercule Poirot, happens to be on the train and heads the investigation, working his way through a cast of colourful characters and using tiny clues to piece together what happened.  The style is economical and readable.  Christie is obviously more interested in people than places, as the train and the outside world are described only in as much detail as they need to be, whereas peoples’' actions and speech are paid a lot more attention. 

The cast of characters is made up of a variety of nations (all of them from Europe or the US), which livens up the proceedings. They are fun to read, although they are shameless racial stereotypes.  The Americans are loud and garish, the English are stiff, the Italian is excitable and passionate and so on. The fact there is such a diverse group of people on board leads Poirot to deduce that everyone must have some connection with America, “"that melting pot”", because there could be no other explanation for having such a diverse group of people traveling together - which seems like a bit of a leap.  The stereotypes are not prejudicial exactly but are ever-present.  Indeed, they are made explicit regularly, with the Italian being suspected because stabbing someone is an Italian way of doing these things apparently.  A jarring moment comes when a character says that such horrific crimes as the murdered man has committed would never happen in Germany, which definitely reminds you that you’re reading a book published in the early 1930s.  However, it would be willful to attack the book for using stereotypes.  Aside from the fact that stereotypes are a trope of genre fiction from all eras, it is true that a lot of people, maybe even a majority of Christie'’s readers thought in this way.  It's the way things were in ye olden days.  That doesn'’t exactly excuse it, but at the same time one can'’t hang something for not having modern sensibilities when it is 80 years old.  The real failing in resorting to stereotypes here is that the characters are quite cartoon-like, making it harder to care about them.  They feel like pieces being pushed around in a game.

The plot is ridiculous, which again is something extremely common in genre fiction and doesn't necessarily count against it.  The fun comes from seeing how the crime is solved.  It’'s a little bit top heavy - a lot of the novel is spent showing the interviewing of the suspects and the collection of evidence, and then the whole thing is wrapped up in about 10 pages.  I felt unconvinced that 12 people, even if they all had a motive, would agree that murder was their best option, especially when their connection to the man is quite tenuous in some cases.  This is where the speed of Christie’'s prose works; it doesn'’t allow you to pause for thought until it is finished, which means that for at least while I was reading it my disbelief was suspended.  Which really does sound like faint praise, but it's a lot harder than it looks, like a lot of conjuring tricks.  The conjuring trick is a good analogy really - everyone knows it's make-believe, and the fun is in the reveal; it's just that as with a conjuring trick the pleasure is transitory (and only really works the once...)

Before reading this book I knew nothing about Poirot aside from the fact he has a moustache.  Most detective novels are successful because of their detective.  Even G K Chesterton’s Father Brown intrigues us because of his drabness.  Perhaps the biggest surprise for me with Murder On The Orient Express was that I didn't actually like Poirot very much. He is clever and cultured but he is aloof and infuriating. He refuses to let his colleagues know exactly what he is thinking, preferring to throw them morsels of information whilst deriding their theories. This is fine; that’s true of most literary detectives.  All of the above criticisms can be levelled at the character of Sherlock Holmes for instance, arguably the only literary detective more famous than Poirot. But, somehow, Holmes is a more likeable character. Perhaps this is because he has a more impish sense of humour; perhaps it is also because while Holmes can be cold. he is also a more colourful character, almost vaudeville (think of his disguises) and more importantly for me, more inclusive. Whereas Holmes can be found slumming it in opium dens and mixing with the Victorian underclass, it is hard to imagine Poirot (based on this novel) undertaking any case which does not involve members of the Edwardian era’s respectable society.

Similarly there were one or two moments were I found Christie's tone unlikeable. The talkative American lady who constantly talks about her daughter is the comic relief in the story, but is not unlikeable. So when on more than one occasion the narrative voice describes photos of her daughter as plain-looking and her grandchildren as "particularly ugly" it seems somewhat cruel - the revelation that ‘Mrs Hubbard’ has been a character-disguise by one of the conspirators in the last few pages doesn’'t excuse this.

Murder On The Orient Express is readable and enjoyable, and doesn’'t aim to do any more than that - therefore it succeeds on its own terms.  But I did feel as I was reading it that it has become a victim of its own fame, and of the over-familiarity with the genre it helped create.  The characters do not linger in the mind, and Poirot himself trades on a reputation one never feels is earned in the novel. Perhaps I should watch o0ne of the film versions, because they always seem to have excellent casts...

Social Status

"Why is it that whenever I put something on Facebook nobody comments on it?" This is my girlfriend, having a social media existential crisis.

"People comment on your Facebook," I reply.

"Yes, but not anywhere near as much as they do on other people's."

"So? It doesn't matter, does it?"

"It does matter! People put on yet another picture of their baby doing exactly the same thing and they get 80 likes or something, but I put some exciting news about me getting a new job and only one like - one! And that's just from you."

"Mine are worth more than other people's."

"It's easy for you to be complacent; everyone always comments on your status updates. It's easy to say recognition's not important when you're always being recognised. Look!" girlfriend exclaims, peering closer at the laptop screen with renewed ire. "You've put a status about my news and loads of people have liked it! And some of them are my friends! My friends, who didn't comment on my status about my news! Oh for God's sake."

"That doesn't matter though, does it?  Maybe they just didn't see it but they saw mine."

"It's so annoying. I hate Facebook."

I sympathise, really; it is annoying. Everyone's been there. You've put up some brilliant picture or clever witticism and it just lingers there forlorn and ignored. The Girlfriend doesn't really use Twitter and I haven't the heart to tell her it's even worse there where tweets quite often get lost in the maelstrom of the twittersphere.

"It's even worse on Twitter," I say. "Twitter's the place to go if you really want to feel ignored."

"That's not the point - all of my friends are on Facebook."

"Don't take it so personally," I say, enjoying the unusual feeling of being the voice of reason. The Kingdom of Reasonableness is not normally my hang out. I'm more often found in downtown Diva Central. "I could understand it if you'd told them all in person and they'd ignored you; I'd even understand it if people were ignoring your texts. But social media's different, it's all pot luck. It depends on what time you post things."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if you post something at night, a lot of people might not read it until at least lunchtime the next day, by which time hundreds of other people have put up more baby pictures."

"Stupid baby pictures."

"They are stupid," I agree. "I especially hate it when people put up 58 pictures of near identical pictures of their baby just lying there with a blank expression."

"And they always get loads and loads of likes and comments. I bet most people just like them out of obligation."

"Probably. The thing is, Twitter and Facebook aren't that social. I sit and tweet on the bus because otherwise I might feel obliged to make small talk with people."

"It really upsets me when it seems like people are ignoring me though."

"Then don't use it; if it's upsetting you just ignore it for a bit. I don't feel the need to do it with Facebook, but Twitter annoys me often enough for me to feel the need to not use it for a bit. Delete the app off your phone. I bet if you speak to people they'll be really happy for you."

"I suppose. It feels pointless using Facebook if no one acknowledges me."

"The trick is just not to care. Just put up posts for your own amusement and to hell with everyone else. And at least it's not Twitter. People really do treat Twitter as a competition. The saddest thing in the world is seeing people tweet about how many tweets or followers they've got. There's a whole lot of dick-swinging about that kind of stuff on Twitter."

"But I like Twitter! John O'Farrell replied to one of my tweets!"

"Use Twitter for a bit then!"

"I think I will."

That's that I think; problem solved. It's true, both of the main social media out there are capable of making people irrationally irritated - taking a break from one and enjoying using the other is probably a really good way of curing this. Yeah - problem solved.

"So - how come I've only got 12 followers and you've got like 100 or something?"

Inward sigh.

"Because I tweet more than you do. You said you were going to tweet at least once a day when you signed up, and you haven't tweeted in more than 2 weeks."

"And people retweet you as well! Why?"

And so on.  Social media has taken a firm hold of the way that we interpret our lives. We do things, we think things, but we feel the need to validate them by putting them up for all to see. And then when no one acknowledges them that makes our actions and thoughts seem somehow less worthy. But we shouldn't live our lives that way - we should just be tweeting and FBing for our own pleasure, and feel pleasantly surprised when people acknowledge us but feel no negativity otherwise. We should feel happy when we waste our leisure time on these silly things, and if we don't feel happy we should just not bother. It's people you meet in the pub that matter, not the assorted online randomers on the internet, many of whom we've never met and never will.

If I said this to The Girlfriend it might make her feel better.

"Because I'm more popular," I say smugly, and get a completely justified glare in return.

Cobra's Snake Oil

Today, I managed to stop myself getting burnt a second time.  Whilst searching for different jobs, I have been putting my CV around a bit, including online job sites such as Monster, Fish4Jobs etc which are reputable enough.  I got a call from someone last week saying that they had seen my CV online and were very interested in meeting me for an interview.

Some Direct Marketeers from Cobra's website;
don't they look so young and thrusting?

This is what everyone who's seeking to improve their career wants to hear; being headhunted is in a way quite flattering.  The fact that at first the person sounded like they were calling from PC World made me feel quite comfortable that they were probably quite a good company to work for, and I was told that they needed someone for their Marketing division - all to the good.  However, when I got the confirmation email, I found out that the person had been calling from TC World - a Direct Marketing company.  And then a lot of doubt began to set in...

The thing is, about 4 years ago I worked for a Direct Marketing company, called the Marketing Machine, also based in Nottingham, and owned by the Cobra Group.  The Cobra Group (also called Appco in some places now) is not particularly well known, but it is massive on a global scale.  Their business model is not dissimilar to pyramid schemes.  They franchise out Direct Marketing (ie chugging and door-to-door sales) to small companies, who then employ people on a self-employed contract to earn them money.  Wherever you are reading this there will be one near you, probably even if you are reading this on the Moon.  When you see adverts for sales or marketing jobs that are vague on salaries but say you can earn "£250-500 per week average", it's probably a Cobra Group thing.  And it's not much fun.

I worked for the Marketing Machine for about 10 days, and it was the worst job I've ever had (making picking lobsters out of Jayne Mansfield's bum sounding like a dream).  I was asked to come in for an interview the very next morning after applying, and was told to dress smartly because I would be meeting the managing director.  If I had been less naive this would have set alarm bells ringing, as managing directors do not often run interviews.  The interview was quick and was effectively a sales pitch from the manager on how great Direct Marketing was as a way to make lots of money very quickly.  At that time in my life it was exactly what I needed to hear as I was stony broke - I suspect this is true for most people who answer these kind of adverts as well.  I have to say all this bluster took me in.  The actual details about working on a self-employed contract were mentioned briefly but not explained.  I was told that it meant in practice that all Marketing Machine were doing were giving me the means to make however much money I wanted to.  I was told that I could start immediately. 

The boredom and lack of self-worth that comes with any period of unemployment means that any job offer seems like an amazing opportunity.  I suppose any cynicism I had about the role was drowned out by the surge of relief that came with knowing that I would have a job and a reason not to watch daytime TV.  And then the job started. 

There were a team of about 10 of us in total, and we would be split into groups of 3 or 4 and sent to different supermarket stores to persuade people to switch their landline contracts to a supposedly better deal.  If the person agreed, they would have to fill in a form there and then, and this would be taken back to the office by me and filed into the system.  I would get some money for each form processed and I suppose Marketing Machine would have done as well.  We were expected to stand in the supermarket (a very well known and well respected one) for at least 8 hours a day but normally closer to 10, approaching everyone who walked past.  The target was 4 signatures a day, but I never got that many and if you didn't you would probably make a loss.  I was paid on a commission-only basis, so if I didn't get any signatures at all, I didn't get any money at all.  As I had to pay for all transport myself, I quite often made a loss; something I had not been told was that although the company was based in Nottingham, the supermarkets I would be going to were not necessarily even in the same city.  I had to go to Derby and Sheffield and pay for the trains myself.  Very often this meant getting back to the office at 7 or 8 in the evening and spending even more time processing the forms.  We were expected to do this 6 days a week.  Although self-employed, we relied on the company to give us the materials to make money, so had no independence whatsoever.  At the end of the 6 days we would be paid cash in hand whatever we had earned.  I can't remember exactly what I got, but I do remember it was considerably less than £200, which worked out as being much less than minimum wage considering all the hours and travel I had put in.

Something the company did which was actually a very good psychological tactic was to encourage out of work socialising.  This at first sounds like quite a positive thing, but I believe the reason for getting everyone to go to the pub before going home every day was to stop us being able to talk to other people about what we were doing.  It certainly felt like it was an attempt to make sure our work seeped into and eventually took over our social life, and meant that we did not see anyone else outside of work.  I mean honestly, what normal company gets its employees to go out every night after work?  By only socialising with people doing the same work it made it seem normal and therefore acceptable.  It also meant I rarely got home until 10 at the earliest, but normally much later.  The disturbing thing was that it was very effective.  Everyone followed each other to the pub like sheep, even though I suspect at least half didn't want to go and the other half were the kind of marketing yobs you see on The Apprentice - ie, awful company.  Although I was there for only a week and a half, they got a hold on me very quickly and I don't consider myself to be unusually susceptible.

I stopped when I did because I was physically and mentally exhausted and thought there was something immoral about the whole thing - I saw people haranguing people well into their late 70s if not older, and someone having no qualms about getting a signature from somebody who obviously had learning difficulties. 

It should be stressed that there was nothing illegal about any of this.  Everything was well above board ans squeaky clean.  In the eyes of the law, there is nothing wrong with any of this.  But it didn't feel like it was right at all.  When I left, I felt like everything was nice and normal again, and I went to see my friends for the first time in almost 2 weeks.

I know I am not the only one to have had this experience.  There was a very good Panorama programme on the subject last year and the Mirror ran an expose on it a few years ago, but these places are still there representing the ugly side of capitalism, unashamedly going about their business sucking up and spitting out the unemployed and the desperate.  This is something that badly needs to be regulated and sorted out by the government but it wasn't touched by the last one and frankly if the supposedly socialist New Labour government didn't want to investigate it I don't see Cameron as being the man for the job.

I don't want to sound bitter about my experience because I'm not, it's not like it ruined my life or anything!  But the moral of this story is, when applying for a job that offers you a weekly wage that seems to good to be true it may well be worth calling ahead and asking if they take people on a self  employed contract - and if they say yes, run a mile!

Insane In The Membrane! Asylum of the Daleks Review

The B-Movie style poster for last night's Doctor Who

So, Doctor Who returned last night by doing what it does best - not exactly what anyone expected it to. 

The gist.  The Doctor, Amy and Rory are kidnapped by human-shaped Dalek 'puppets' and sent to go and destroy a kind of Dalek Borstal - the Daleks themselves are too scared to go down there.  This must be a pretty harsh place then, we think.  We had been told (or at least it had been bandied around on Twitter) that we would see all the old Daleks over the years in action which turned out not to be sort of but not really true - quite rightly.  Although it would have given me and a lot of other fanboys a short-term thrill to see the Specials Weapon Dalek in action again, it would probably have happened at the expense of the plot and characters and other things that keep non-obsessive normal people watching.  When Davros was brought back a few years ago it didn't really work because there was no reason for him to be there other than for people to go "Ooh, look, Davros!" before going back to trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

Instead, Steven Moffat's script did the exact opposite - it relaunched the Daleks, and did it by not so much rewriting the Daleks' history as just treating it as something less important than the Daleks' present.  It introduced new things like a Parliament of Daleks, complete with a blobby Prime Minister and the idea of the eponymous Asylum - a place for all the imperfections to go hang out.  It also ended the idea of the Daleks seeing The Doctor as an arch-enemy by having them forget who he is, which is such a brilliantly simple way of rebooting some established villains it reminds you there's life in the old format yet.  It also did all this efficiently and without too much fuss so it could get down to the really interesting task of dealing with The Doctor's current companions divorcing and his new companion being a Dalek (and now an exploded Dalek at that).

After the body/psycho-horror of seeing someone being converted into a Dalek again (as in Revelation of the Daleks), the Cybermen in Doctor Who are redundant again.  The idea of someone willingly being trapped in their own mind to avoid accepting the fact they're now a Dalek was done in a genuinely dramatic and shocking way.  It also upset some continuity nuts online (we'll get to them in a bit).  In fact, the whole episode had its feet firmly planted in the Horror genre instead of the Action/Sci-Fi tales one normally expects from a Dalek story.  Rory tip-toeing through a crypt with cobwebby, dormant, lunatic Daleks was much more exciting than CGI-fleets of them going 'Bang!'  And the worry that Amy might be going to turning into a Dalek felt like a genuine worry, even though everyone knows that the chances are pretty good for The Doctor and friends surviving.  There were a few things that in retrospect didn't exactly add up (like, for instance, The Doctor not realising that the Woman From Emmerdale was going to be a Dalek even though he's been chatting to her all episode), but on the whole it felt true to its own agenda.

The aforementioned continuity-nuts online weren't keen on a few aspects of the story, one of the most frequently voiced criticisms online being that the Daleks don't turn humans into Daleks.  Which is the kind of Doctor Who criticism that is great if you fancy a laugh.  When will people realise that it's so much easier to accept the fact that Doctor Who frequently contradicts its own past (and sometimes its own present) and celebrate that?  Because it's that willingness to disregard its own past that is the reason it's lasted for 50-odd years.  It's nothing new for fans to dislike rewriting supposedly established concepts and one wearily reaches for the infamous 70s review of 'A Deadly Assassin' to see why these fans end up looking a bit po-faced and silly.  In fact, a lot of the 'classic' Doctor Who stories make no sense compared to what went before them (Spearhead From Space, Genesis Of The Daleks and so on).  This is why I like the show; it's willing to keep the most important things about the show and chuck out the past if it gets in the way of a good story in the present.  There are very few 'rules' in Doctor Who story telling.  Terrence Dicks said that the rule of thumb of what was important about the past of the show was just what you could remember, and Paul Cornell said that it is the job of the fan, not the writers, to worry about continuity, if they're that way inclined.

Why can't the Daleks turn people into Daleks?  Aside from the fact it's something which has been done before anyway, they are fictional, you know?  They didn't used to be able to fly or have a creator called Davros, and they might one day be able to grow legs and go for a run, or sing Abba songs, or give birth to little baby Daleks or whatever.  It's part of the fun.  I like being a fan of a show that instead of surreptitiously changing its lead actor James Bond-style and hoping no-one notices makes it into a massive plot-device (and one that isn't really explained for over 5 years), and carries on with the more important task of making ambitious and interesting stories for anyone who fancies watching.  Because its always succeeded as a show primarily concerned with stories, not as a show aimed at a fanbase.  So when I read people writing thjings like 'Daleks turning people into Daleks makes no sense' I think 'Yeah, I was forgetting that a man travelling in a box that's bigger on the inside is exactly the premise that requires a gritty attention to detail in order to work' and move on (or write a blog about it depending on how pompous I'm feeling).  There's been more expert analysis on fans and continuity on Phillip Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorium blog comment sections if that's the kind of thing that floats yer boat.

So that little rant over with, what next?  We've been told that this series isn't going to worry too much about complex story arcs and is going to do more individual stories which I think is a good thing, not because I'm against them per se but because I think Doctor Who is at its best when changing direction and we've had quite a lot of story arcs over the last few years.  Amy and Rory are going, which will make me sad; Woman From Emmerdale who turned out to be a Dalek and was blown up is going to be a new companion in Christmas, which should be interesting; and there are some dinosaurs on a spaceship next week which will be fun, though might contradict a Jon Pertwee story from the 1970s or something.  It's good to see a show approach its 50th year and  being relevant event telly again.

Nessie vs God!

The 'Surgeon's Photograph' - Nessie in the 1930s...

Nessie of Loch Ness shows up very nicely the way human beings think.  Loch Ness is a place of such natural beauty and genuinely astounding facts, it makes you ask yourself why people through the ages have felt the need to look at it through the prism of a green monster. It is a true fact that you could drown every human being 3 times over in the Loch; that it holds more fresh water than is in all of England and Wales put together; that it is deeper than the BT tower is tall; and so on.  It is not a true fact that there is a beastie living down there which may, or may not be dinosaur-like but either way does wonders for the cuddly toy industry in local village Drumnadrochit. But true facts often don't make for great cuddly toys and interestingly shaped chocolate bars...

Th Nessie myth endures a) because it is mysterious, b) because it has fascinating characters and c) because it is fun to speculate about things just for the sake of it.  There is something more fun in finding about something which is probably not true than in finding about something that definitely is.  That's why children love stories about mysterious monsters and ghosts so much more than continental drift and what have you.  But it's point b) there that really makes something like the Nessie myth work for me; all those characters over the years who have spent time hoaxing photos and hoodwinking journos. Everyone loves a good story, and someone's always willing to supply one.  A good story doesn't have to be rooted in truth as long as it's a good story.  When people went exploring in the Loch looking for Nessie, they found some Arctic Char which they believed had been there undiscovered since the last Ice Age.  That should be (and is) mind-blowing, but they didn't also find a big monster wearing a tam o' shanter so no one - or at least, no one from the press - was all that bothered.  When a frankly demented looking journalist claimed to have found gigantic footprints down there the press were all over him though, even when it turned out he'd just cobbled something together from hippopotamus feet.

So anyway, whilst walking around the Drumnadrochit Loch Ness Exhibition Centre (£7 was too much for what there is to see, but some interesting stuff nonetheless) I found myself thinking about how Nessie and God might as well be the same thing and it wouldn't really change anything.  The credible evidence for the existence of either is quite patchy, and if anything the idea of an unknown creature living deep deep down in uncharted territory is more beleiveable than a superbeing who not only created everything, but by being everywhere at once is everything.  The myths surrounding Loch Ness have survived because of the colourful characters who have told tall tales over the years, and faked photographs and artifacts of varying quality.  It's these people who truly fascinate - not just those cheeky rascals who have convinced the credulous to believe in monsters, but those who genuinely appear to have deluded themselves; so-called cryptozoologists, men who never stopped believing in monsters and ghosts.  People who have seen a piece of wood floating in some water and who have unconsciously managed to develop it into something astounding is in itself astounding.

God, looking a bit cartoony if we're honest.

God has also survived as a concept because colourful characters throughout the ages have told if anything even more colourful stories about him.  Whatever you say about Nessie, no one has ever claimed (to my knowledge) that they were the Son of Nessie, or has been willing to die for the love of Nessie.  But really, why do we take the testimony of people from thousands of years ago who have claimed to act as they do because they talked to a burning bush?  I mean we do take religious people more seriously, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't; but I do want to know why?  On paper, that kind of behaviour, running around believing in omnipresent beings looks like insanity on a much larger scale than people believing in unexplained wildlife.  And that in itself wouldn't be an issue, except that it tends to be very religious people who look down on believers in the paranormal and unexplained phenomena. They dismiss other peoples' theories as nonsense and then go and worship a man who came back from the dead, and society considers this to be normal, and that's something I don't get.

Also, as the pictures here show, at least there are photos of Nessie, badly faked ones admittedly but surely more 'realistic' than the often hilariously overblown paintings, cartoons and drawings of God we have to rely on?  Look, I'm fully aware that I'm being facetious here, but surely there's some kind of point in there somewhere...?

Historically speaking, I don't believe much would be different today if we thought that God was an omnipresent lizard living in the sky and that Nessie was an old man living at the bottom of Loch Ness. Because there's not enough evidence for the existence of either, they are completely interchangeable.  All it would mean is different iconography and more amusing flags in religious wars.  People who believe in the ongoing wonders of the natural world come under mockery in a way that the religious often don't, which is a shame. I wouldn't mock someone for their beliefs whatever they were (not to their face, anyway) but somehow one type of belief is more socially acceptable than the other.

Really I should admire people for having any beliefs because I don't really have any of my own. At least lovers of God and searchers for Nessie have something that drives them and gives their lives meaning.  I'm not actually criticising either group for having their beliefs; I just think that the fact that one belief is considered 'normal' and the other 'freaky' by a lot of the world needs to be explained to me more.