Doctor Who is weird.

The first episode of Doctor Who I saw was from Tom Baker’s introductory adventure, Robot. As that was broadcast between the end of December 1974 and mid-January 1975, I must have been three and half years old at the time, which means that seeing the programme is one of my earliest memories. (Sitting in a bath watching my chicken pox peel off comes a close, but not so fondly-remembered, second).

I pretty soon wanted to be the Doctor. (I don’t mean I wanted to act the part. I mean I wanted to be the Doctor.) But it was the monsters that most fascinated me. The two are, of course, inseparable. The Doctor is the corrective called for by the imbalancing evil of the monsters; the monsters are the shadow cast by the heroic light of the Doctor. It’s why the Doctor always has an intuitive knowledge about the enemy he faces, often before he sets eyes on it/them — as soon as he steps out of the TARDIS he knows, like he can sniff it in the air, something’s afoot. And he often knows the sort of something it is, as well as the sort of foot, sucker, or pseudopod it’s afoot on. The reason for this is that the Doctor and the Monsters are one. They’re part of the same psychological picture.

Looking over the first few seasons of Doctor Who that I saw — seasons presided over by the dream-team of Philip Hinchcliffe as producer and Robert Holmes as script-editor — there’s a lot of blurring the line between men and monsters. In The Ark in Space, the far-future human Noah turns by painful stages into an insectile Wirrn (courtesy of a generous helping of green plastic bubble-wrap). In Genesis of the Daleks, Davros, already half robot himself (the other half a distinctly withered Mr Potato Head), fast-forwards his people’s evolution into slug-like creatures encased in “Mark III Travel Machines” (banality-of-evil-speak for Daleks). There’s the Jekyll & Hyde Professor Sorenson possessed by anti-matter in The Planet of Evil, and Marcus Scarman with his mind taken over by the evil alien Sutekh in Pyramids of Mars. There’s the humanoid androids all set to take over the Earth in The Android Invasion, and a man turning into an alien plant-monster in The Seeds of Doom… Virtually every story has men turning into monsters or monsters masquerading as men. (With some, such as the Cybermen, the process is complete before the story begins.)

The Doctor and the Monsters, like Angels and Demons, are opposing absolutes. The real story takes place in between, in the human realm. Here, there’s the constant threat that you, a human being, might turn into a monster. And not just a green bubble-wrap one. There are far more insidious forms of human monster. That first season of Doctor Who I saw (the twelfth since the show began) was particularly full of fascists, cold intellectual elites, and power-mad scientists — all ways in which people can really become monsters.

To the child I was, unable to understand any of this consciously, having that inner battle between humanity and monstrosity spelled out in such clear, vivid, excitingly fantastic terms was, I think, a vital part of the appeal of watching the programme. It also perhaps explains why I felt so disgusted when Colin Baker began his tenure as the Doctor by attempting to strangle his companion. That was 1984. Dark heroes were very much of the times (Watchmen was only two years away), but I couldn’t see the point in a Doctor indistinguishable from the monsters he was supposed to be fighting. Having watched every episode since Robot with almost religious devotion, I gave up. There are still some Colin Baker stories I haven’t seen, and never will.

But Doctor Who had done its job.

Whenever I read about the formative influences of my favourite writers & artists, there’s usually a point where they discover a cache of story — a collection of myths and legends, a book of fairy tales, a copy of The Arabian Nights. Doctor Who was my story-cache, and that weird, down-a-metallic-rabbit-hole theme tune was its “once upon a time”. (The TARDIS, bigger on the inside than the out, is the through-the-wardrobe portal to the only thing that is truly bigger on the inside, the imagination.) In its gleefully pulpy way, Doctor Who regularly plundered myth, fairy tale, popular entertainment, literature, history and science for ideas and storylines. (The Hinchcliffe-Holmes era had a particular penchant for Gothic Horror, Hammer style.) As such, it was the ultimate all-in-one cultural education for the final quarter of the 20th century.

That and Blue Peter, anyway.

Drive

This has become such a commonplace in films, usually thrillers, it’s almost a convention. The hero wins not because (as in King Arthur‘s day) right gives might, but because he can turn on the violence at a snap. And the reason he can do this is because, like the hero of Drive, he’s been scarred into emotional deadness, and so, to him, violence is as unemotional as any other activity. Usually, he’ll be given a dead wife or child to explain this raging void inside him, but this is done so often it’s become a convention, and is more a shorthand to get us to simultaneously sympathise with and hero-worship our hero, while granting him the power of ultra-violence. Drive wasn’t a bad film at all, but I felt it’s main fault was the way it took on this convention too much as a convention, without saying anything new about it.

Tyrannosaur is a far more gruelling watch. Which isn’t to say I didn’t laugh a couple of times — though I’m not sure if that wasn’t because I’m so used to seeing Olivia Colman in comedies, and her timing and delivery of lines is so perfectly comic, it can get you even in non-comedic scenes. I wasn’t laughing by the end, though. Unlike Drive, Tyrannosaur is all about that blind sense of objectless, burstingly-repressed rage that compels its characters to violence — and not the heroic, villain-bashing violence of Drive, but the petty, or worse-than-petty, violence to loved ones and neighbours. Its main character, Joseph (Peter Mullan), having started things off by kicking his own dog to death and throwing a brick through a Post Office window, takes refuge in a charity shop run by Hannah (Olivia Colman), who, being forgiving, meek and middle class, seems perfectly designed to annoy the always-annoyed Joseph. She is, however, the one person to show him any sort of emotion other than anger, and he can’t help coming back to see her, even if all he can offer in exchange, at first, is abuse. And it turns out Hannah is no stranger to abuse.

This is by no means a feelgood film — it has more in common with a Jacobean tragedy — though it avoids, to my mind, the sort of ultra-abject miserablism some have accused it of. But by the end of it, I had that peculiar washed-clean feeling you can get after watching a really stark, scouring, take-it-out-of-you drama. This is nothing like the air-punching triumphalism you’re invited to feel by a film such as Drive, whose hero uses his powers of ultra-violence to beat up the baddies (who need beating up because they’ve used their violence to beat up goodies), and walk away feeling he’s done a good deed. Here, you’re left feeling that the violence itself must surely have been exhausted, and perhaps, just perhaps, overcome, by its characters, though only by being taken to such awful extremes. In Drive, the hero’s emotional deadness leaves him heroically lonely by the end of the film, a sort of scapegoat for the violence of the society he lives in; in Tyrannosaur, the characters are far more human because, however emotionally dead they may think themselves, every repetition of violence or verbal abuse surprises them into feeling their own wounds yet again. For them, there is no escape from hurting themselves every time they hurt others, though they continue to do so for far too long. In this, it’s a far more honest, and brutal, depiction of violence.

Cinema is all too much in love with the glamour of violence, and films which rely on it for sheer spectacle all too often make lazy use of conventional signs about how violence affects its characters (the cop who ends every day soaking his sorrows over a photo of his estranged family, for instance) — a quick tip of the hat to the reality of things rather than an attempt to understand — then getting on with the action. Meanwhile, a film like Tyrannosaur comes along to illustrate how violence wounds the perpetrator as much as the victim, and the result is the sort of catharsis talked about as being the function of the great tragedies, be it Oedipus Rex or Hamlet. A sort of exhaustion of rage through being faced too much with its after-effects. Not an easy watch, by any means, but an oddly rewarding one.

But then there’s the second half, and I never fail to be disappointed by it. It’s at this point the film sloughs off its weirdness for action; it leaves its ideas behind and settles for a shoot-out and a suicide. It has the effect of someone breaking off an interesting and well-reasoned debate to sock his opponent in the jaw, and represents a similar failure of ideas, or perhaps a lack of courage in its convictions.

After all, the potential was there, particularly once Renn has encountered the Ballardian video prophet Brian O’Blivion, whose Cathode Ray Mission aims to bring TV to the homeless, and who only communicates with the world via video tapes. O’Blivion (a gloriously silly name that surely points to this very much not being intended as a standard action thriller) sees the TV as an extension of the mind, and believes the sort of sleaze peddled by Max Renn’s Channel 83 to be a necessary outing for the murky, nightmarish depths of the unconscious. His is the sort of “philosophy” Videodrome ought to be about — and it’s the philosophy the first half most definitely is about. O’Blivion seeks to liberate mankind from the strictures of reality with the (then-new) power of video, even if it is a savage, uncivilised liberation. At least it will be an honest one.

But it turns out O’Blivion isn’t the man behind the brain-tumour inducing video signal known as Videodrome. That is Spectacular Opticals, an arch-reactionary mega-corporation, who aside from selling cheap glasses and missile guidance systems, seek to skim the scum from the human race using video-brainwashed killers (programmed by pulsating Betamax tapes). And the trouble is, theirs is a boring philosophy compared to the zany O’Blivion’s.

With O’Blivion’s enlightenment-through-video-sleaze we’d have the ending that, apparently, Cronenberg initially planned — a vision of Max Renn, Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry) and Bianca O’Blivion melded together in one “new flesh”, in some video version of heaven. But for some reason he swapped it for what we instead have — people getting shot at a corporate sales conference — the logical consequence of Spectacular Opticals’ realistic philosophy, yes, but so dull to watch after the visual richness of the first half of the film.

Perhaps the trouble is Cronenberg is a good director of the subtleties — and of actors — while having a strong love of the pulpier types of horror. Torn between the two, his films perhaps promise too much of both, but can only fulfil one side of the bargain. (I certainly felt the same about A History of Violence, which I thought, from the beginning, was going to be all about the is-he-or-isn’t-he-a-gangaster of Viggo Mortensen’s character, only to be disappointed when it turned into yet another shoot out in the second half.)

My favourite Cronenberg film remains The Dead Zone, which keeps its use of the fantastic very cut back, and tells its tale of emotional reserve and quiet disappointment just as effectively as Videodrome delivers its first-half shocks and disorientations, but sticks with them to the end.

You might be forgiven for thinking, from its title, The Owl Service perhaps influenced a certain aspect of the Harry Potter novels. I certainly imagined, before I read it, that it would feature scenes of owls swooping into rooms delivering important messages about magical things to breathless teens — but the “service” of the title in fact refers to a dinner service, a set of plates patterned with a design which at first glance appears to be flowers, but which can also be seen as owls. (This is an actual dinner service Garner’s mother-in-law discovered, and which is reproduced in the book.)

A set of plates? It might sound a disappointing basis for a fantasy novel, but Garner’s book is all about the meeting of the mundane and the mystical/mythical, the way an ancient story can overwrite everyday reality, forcing it towards potentially tragic ends.

The link between owls and flowers is the story of Blodeuwedd, a combination of letters destined to bamboozle the autocorrect facility of even the most advanced spellchecker. Blodeuwedd was a woman created out of flowers at the behest of Lleu Llaw Gyffes. Although created for him, Blodeuwedd turns out to have a mind (and heart) of her own, and falls in love with Gronw Pebr instead. Gronw kills Lleu; Lleu is resurrected and kills Gronw; then Blodeuwedd, poor girl, is turned into an owl for her part in her husband’s murder. This is the pattern of events that, building up in a static-like charge around one particular house in an isolated Welsh valley, seeks to impose its tragedy on a trio of youngsters once every generation. The “Owl Service” of the title, the plates with the flowers/owls design, was one particular generation’s attempt to trap or divert the energy of the myth away from an actual murder. It failed, and the events of the novel are heavy with the never-to-be-spoken-of tragedy of the previous generation. And of course the very keeping of that secret only serves to make it more likely to play out again, as, in The Owl Service, we get to see how a contemporary (mid-1960s) trio of teens, two English and middle-class comfortably-off, one Welsh and poor, deal with it.

The writing style, with its cut-back descriptions and dialogue free of any sort of adjectival prompting, means you, as the reader, have a little bit more work to do than in the average novel. This quickly proves to The Owl Service‘s advantage, though, as that little bit extra work creates a great deal more emotional investment. (I could hear the voices of the characters far better than in most novels.) Garner trusts his readers to be as sensitive and intelligent as he is about the micro-politics and emotional tussles of a small household held back by a little bit too much English reserve and oppressive class-consciousness. It also means that, when something strange happens, you often end up doing a double-take — did what I think happened really just happen? — which is of course what the characters are thinking, too.

Although it’s quite a short novel, it builds its power gradually, leaving it right to the end to resolve — something I loved in Elidor, and which worked only a little bit less effectively here. The sense of the tragedies of the past — both the ancient, mythical past, and that of the previous generation — weighing in on the innocents of the present, at the very moment they lose their innocence, and the horror of their inability to see just how they’re being twisted into playing parts in an ancient tragedy, creates a tight drama using only a few characters that nevertheless feels as though it’s reaching epic depths.

Garner is, along with Robert Holdstock, one of the few writers I know to really capture the dark, barbarous, wild side of the mythical imagination, to write about the way myths and stories really can affect us to the core, modern-minded though we are. Both writers also have a strong sense of the landscape they’re writing in, how it surrounds, traps, inspires, enchants, and shapes the characters within it. Despite the sparse descriptions, something in The Owl Service made me feel that this was very much a landscape I knew, which is something that’s always made me connect with a book (or film — it’s partly why I love 70s Brit horror and Doctor Who) that much more.

Of Garner’s later work, I’ve only read Thursbitch, an adult novel which is even more cut-back in its descriptions, and even more intense in its tying together events past and present, people and the landscape they move through. I can’t work out why I haven’t read more of his work. I certainly intend to.