Children's TV, page 5 of 5

There are two children’s TV programmes I really remember being frightened by as a kid. (Doctor Who, oddly enough, isn’t one of them, even though I distinctly remember seeing episodes when I was as young as three or four. My mum did once tell me I used to hide behind the sofa to watch it, but I can’t see how, as our sofa was against the wall!) Of one of the programmes, all I can remember are scary shots of power lines and pylons, along with some weird music. A little online research reveals that it must have been The Changes, shown in 1975. Judging by the plot description, that’s one I’d really love to see again, but there’s no DVD release. The other programme I remember, though, has been brought out by Network DVD, earlier this year, so I thought I’d give it a go.

All I remembered from King of the Castle was its basic premise: a kid gets in a lift, which plummets down to some sub-basement level, stranding him in a weird, underground fantasy world. That was enough to scare me back in 1977! And, of course, to make me want to watch it. (The series was planned to be shown during the week, but apparently it was thought too scary, so was moved to the Sunday teatime slot when kids would be watching with their parents. This has long been a traditional time for TV fantasy, usually on the BBC. King of the Castle, though, was ITV.)

Watching the programme now, of course, I wonder what on Earth I found scary about it. Probably, just the opening sequence with its plummeting lift — all that metallic-electric menace is enough for an imaginative kid to start scaring himself silly. The rest of the programme is a bit like a slightly dark Alice in Wonderland, as young Roland (named after the knight in Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came“, which gets quoted at one point) starts journeying his way upwards from the dungeons of the Castle into which he has fallen, encountering its weird denizens on the way, and having to elude their attempts to capture him, enslave him, or just plain kill him. The twist I probably missed back in 1977 is that each of the characters Roland meets in the Castle is a warped, nightmare version of someone from his daily life — his choirmaster becomes a mad scientist who tries to steal his voice, his stepmother becomes an evil sorceress who wants to make him forget his real life and remain with her, and so on. The early episodes all feel a bit, well, episodic — unrelated, and not adding up to an overall story — till we get to the last two or three parts (of seven), when Roland finally reaches the top of the castle and makes himself its king. It’s only then that you get a sense of the journey he’s been on having a more meaningful plot, as all the old characters come back for an Alice in Wonderland-ish trial. Episode two does have a rather effective chase sequence, though, where overlapped images give the scene a fittingly nightmarish confusion:

Throughout, Roland is helped (in various, not always obviously helpful, ways) by Vein, the keeper of the keys (played by the wonderfully Welsh Talfryn Thomas), who serves a role somewhere between the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat, with perhaps a bit of Mad Hatter thrown in. It’s he who sees Roland through the journey, even opposing him when he becomes king, which is where the series really picks up. (Unfortunately, that’s right near the end.)

It turns out, of course, to be a rites-of-passage growing up story, as Roland learns to stand up for himself against the people keeping him down in the real world, including a rather pantomime-style bully (who crumbles unconvincingly when Roland finally stands up to him). I was a bit disappointed that Roland demonstrated his new grown-up status by throwing away his comics. Howard the Duck, I’m sure I’d have agreed with, but what about those old copies of Hammer Horror?

And scary moments? The things that seem scary to a kid are quite different from what seems scary to an adult. As I say, at the time the thing that most scared me was the idea of being stuck in that underground world via a plummeting lift. Watching the programme again, the thing I found most scary was the creature that the scientist Hawkspur (played by Fulton Mackay) creates. His attempts to steal Roland’s voice and give it to his creation results in a weird, semi-electronic honking coming out whenever the creature opens its mouth. That seems far more frightening, now, but I probably just found it funny as a kid…

I don’t want to, but I have to admit it: I hate the new series of Doctor Who. I tried not to, because that’s exactly what a betrayed fanboy would feel, and though I was a real fan of the series, I don’t like thinking of myself as a fanboy.

But I do have reasons — one all-pervading reason, in fact. There’s a quality the show has that it didn’t have before, a quality not just evident in the content and style, but in the very way it’s marketed. That quality is smugness. The new series of Doctor Who is smug.

The show’s acting (from the lead actors, anyway) is smug. It’s probably very good acting, but it doesn’t serve the drama. Rather, it seems to be trying to prove what good acting it is. The two lead actors seem so pleased with the way they can add little interpretative frills to each line, the way they can spin the dialogue to make it sound throwaway and casual and humorous (or, too often for my liking, self-righteous, which is the dominant tone of the likes of Eastenders), but the result, for me, is most definitely not a sustained narrative trying to create an overall effect (horror, or wonder, or the thrill of adventure), but merely a series of affective soundbites — emotibites, you could call them — no doubt intended to keep a jaded, emotionally sluggish audience engaged.

The show is smug in relation to its audience in other ways. It tells its audience what to feel, moment by moment. For instance, in an episode from the first series where Rose is taken out onto the top of Captain Jack’s spacecraft hovering above a blitzed-out London, she says something like: “I’m standing on a spaceship hovering above London!” The subtext of this statement of the obvious is: “Look, you stupid audience, this is a wonder moment — feel the wonder, feel it!” Not only is this treating the audience like a bunch of idiots who can’t feel anything unless it’s spelled out for them, it’s doing an injury to the deeper psychological function of the show’s drama. The great thing about any sort of drama is that it allows a viewer to interpret it in a way that’s personal to them. It’s only by doing this, by allowing the viewer to impose their own emotional concerns, that it’ll be able to have its effect — cathartic, uplifting, whatever. The difference between that and what the new series of Doctor Who is doing is the same as the difference between a laugh generated by a funny joke and a laugh that comes from someone holding up a card that says LAUGH. If you constrict a viewer’s emotional responses by telling them what to feel, you cut them off from their genuine emotional concerns and do them no benefit at all. (And I thought the above example of Rose’s spelling-out-the-wonder was bad till David Tennant came along and over-egged the wonder at almost every opportunity. He’s always saying something like, “Aren’t humans brilliant?” like that kid from The Fast Show. Who was brilliant.)

The show also has what I call the smugness of the present. This is a special sort of smugness you feel if you think the age you’re living in is so much better than every other age simply because it’s the age you live in. It’s the smugness of people who think history is over now we’ve got everything right. It’s the smugness that leads to remakes of classic movies, a smugness that says: “Of course we’ll make Psycho better this time round, because we’ll be doing it with modern technology,” or, “Of course we’ll make Dracula better this time round, we’ll be doing it with a modern sensibility,” or whatever. But here’s an example from the show. It’s the episode from the first season that had Charles Dickens in. Rose meets a Victorian-age serving maid. Almost straightaway, Rose asks something like, “Where did you go to school?” A pretty unlikely question to ask someone you’ve just met, unless you feel they might have gone to a school known to you. (Which in this is quite unlikely, as Rose is talking to a woman born a century before her, and half a country away.) The only reason she asks the question, then, is so viewers in the 21st century can feel self-satisfied at how much more enlightened they are when the serving maid answers, “I didn’t go to no school.” Oh how misguided those Victorians were! Oh how much more enlightened we are in our wonderful age of school and… school and… Oh, all those other wonderful things we have in our wonderful age! We treat our poor so much better! (We still have poor, though, so let the smugness end there.) The thing that’s wrong with this is that the whole point of science fiction taking us to other worlds is not to make us feel how much we, in our current age, have got it right, but how much we’ve got it wrong, how much further we’ve still got to go.

Another smugness that gets to me is how the show is being marketed. The Christopher Eccleston season of Doctor Who was released on DVD as “Season One”. Why? Because this new series of Doctor Who is obviously so much better than those others, it requires a whole new chronology. Those last thirty years of the show, they were B.C. This new series is A.D. We’re out of the dark ages and into the light! The messiah has come!

If only the new series was worth being smug about. It gets so much wrong. The format is too short to build up both an entirely new fantasy world and a drama set inside it, so as a result we get what I call tokenised fantasy, where you end up in situations like the end of that recent two-parter with the Beast living on a planet near a black hole, where the Doctor had to smash some vases or whatever in order to defeat it. Smash vases? It’s meaningless. It was simply a way of resolving the drama by inserting a “this story ends here” token. Tokenised fantasy. The Doctor and Rose’s are they/aren’t they relationship (modelled on a far more believable sexual tension between Mulder and Scully in The X-Files) just doesn’t work because we know it won’t ever happen, so it comes across as audience manipulation on one level and confusion as to what the characters’ real feelings are on another. The show’s style is comedic. This isn’t to say the old show didn’t have its comic moments, but when they worked it was because it was the characters who were being funny, while the world they were in remained serious, meaning the darkness they were facing within that world remained potent. (I of course exclude the Sylvester McCoy, or “pantomime”, era from this statement.) The new series can’t take itself seriously, almost like it’s embarrassed to be dealing with the vivid emanations of its writers’ imaginations. You can joke about fantasy, but if you don’t at the same time allow yourself to value what the fantasy’s about, to take the underlying drama seriously, you’ll gain nothing from it. It’s like all those awful stories that end with it “just being a dream”. If it’s “just” a dream, you don’t have to take it seriously, and all that darkness within you, well, you don’t have to take that seriously, either, you don’t have to face it, you can just let it boil away and devour you from the inside, nice and slowly. The new series of Doctor Who wants to come across as non-threatening; as a result it comes across as fluff.

I know the old series of Doctor Who wasn’t perfect. It’s almost a rule that even the best stories were flawed by at least one really awful moment (the giant clams in Genesis of the Daleks, the fluffy rat in The Talons of Weng Chiang), but this was because of their tight budget. Knowing they weren’t able to produce something to rival Hollywood’s Most Expensive, they were forced to make sure they got the tone right. They quite literally couldn’t afford to be smug.

I could go on and on, but I’m sure I’ve embarrassed myself enough for the moment, betrayed fanboy that I am. I’ll go away now and mumble to myself in the corner.

But — alright one more thing — the music. The music. The old Doctor Who theme tune was an invitation to another world. It was weird, frightening, mysterious. It was numinous. The new music is an invitation to curl up with a cushion. It’s multi-layered, beautifully produced, ever so correct. It’s technologically smug. And sterile.

Alright, I really will shut up now.