"Like an old man trying to send back soup in a Deli" - The Seinfeld Supremacy

I trust we're not forgetting about Seinfeld? Fourteen years on from when it concluded, it remains unsurpassed, and probably always will be. If you've never seen it, or are starting to think of it as dated, get hold of a DVD right now and start with season 5 (or go straight to the season 6 episode The Jimmy) The first two seasons are good but quite gentle. The third season features some terrific episodes and the fourth even more, but the fifth season sees the show reach perfection, with the plotting and characterisation exquisitely balanced and every line, plot idea and nuance funny in a unique way. Seasons 5 and 6 are probably the show's peak, although 7, 8 and 9 are not very far behind.

Seinfeld is pure comedy: it isn't about detailed and believable characterisation, satire or tragedy. It must be understood in this way; no time for any of that "The Office is painfully real / Steptoe and Son is like a Pinter play / Basil Fawlty is quite a tragic figure really" stuff here. The same goes for the oft-cited "no hugs, nothing learned" rule: although it's true, this is never used to give the show airs of something more than comedy (as it happens, there is an episode of Seinfeld - The Betrayal - based on a Pinter play, but crucially it's a lot funnier than Pinter). Even the death of George's fiancé Susan is never allowed to be anything other than funny. Instead, the show plays with language. Choosing an episode at random for this piece, a glance at The Chicken Roaster reveals two linked throwaway lines with the signature flourish which none of Seinfeld's writers can stop generating but which British comedy writers these days can only dream of. Jerry runs into Seth, an old college buddy, who's got a meeting at work to go to, but Jerry insists they catch up on old times and asks "whatever happened to Moochie?" as they walk off arm-in-arm: "he's dead." "is that right?" Over lunch, Seth discloses that the meeting was rather important: he works for a big investment firm, and it was their first meeting with their latest investors. Seth subsequently loses his job, and stays cheerful, insisting it was worth it to catch up with an old college buddy: "I only knew you through Moochie," replies Jerry. Those two exquisite Moochie lines, almost throwaway by Seinfeld's standards, contain the show's aesthetic, and one that only comedy could have produced. The pleasurable effect of hearing a funny name like Moochie is linked to the poignancy of Seth's predicament and the destructive effect of friendship with Jerry.

 This linguistic playfulness can be found in every episode. "I don't WANNA be a pirate," says Jerry in The Puffy Shirt, adding a child-like high-pitched whine to "wanna" as he reprises a variation of the line in subsequent episodes each time someone demands he take on a role. "You're killing independent George!" wails George in The Pool Guy. "So Biff wants to be a buff," says Jerry in The Boyfriend. The Voice sees Jerry unable to kick the habit of saying "Hellooooo!" in a stupid voice, The Yadda Yadda is based in the idea that the titular phrase can be used to conceal important information, while The Summer of George sees Elaine irritated by men's tendency to make miaowing noises whenever a woman criticises another woman, even if the men made the criticism first. The title character in The Jimmy has an irritating habit of referring to himself in the third person. Lines from the Buddy Rich tapes - "I'm gonna show you what's it like", "this guy - this is not my kind of guy" and "we'll see how he does up there, without all the assistance" - are gleefully inserted into the dialogue of The Opposite, The Understudy and The Butter Shave respectively. Jerry Stiller's performance as George's father Frank - one of the funniest things ever caught on camera - peaks with those moments when what seems like the actor's struggle to remember lines lends them something you could never have imagined: "He had this big smiling face: it was like a biiiig...apple pie" (The Understudy). "I saw a provocative movie on cable last bight. It was called The Net, with that girl from the bus" (The Serenity Now). Best of all is this exchange with George's mother (the wonderful Estelle Harris) from The Puffy Shirt:

Estelle: Georgie, would you like some Jello?
Frank : Why do you put the bananas in there?
Estelle: George likes the bananas!
Frank : SO LET HIM HAVE BANANAS ON THE SIDE!"




The bizarre staccato roar in which Stiller delivers the last line is as good an example of what an actor can do to a line one could hope for. Phil Morris as the ultimate ambulance-chasing lawyer Jackie Chiles and Steve Hytner as Jerry's least favourite stand-up Kenny Bania also create their own verbal style, but to describe what they, Wayne Knight as Newman, John O'Hurley as J. Peterman and Len Lesser as Uncle Leo can do with a line would render this piece book-length.

   Sometimes it might be a non-verbal gesture that creates the poetry of comedy. The Pie starts off with the simple conceit of Jerry's girlfriend shaking her head when he offers her some pie. This baffles Jerry, but later on they eat at a restaurant run by Poppy (played with gusto by Reni Santoni), and Jerry sees him leaving a toilet cubicle without washing his hands. His girlfriend insists he tries some pie: all Jerry can do is shake his head in an identical way. Later, George is having lunch with prospective new employers and they pass him some pie, but George spots the chef watching furtively and realises he's an enemy from earlier in the episode who has contaminated his food in revenge. As his potential new employers demand he take a bite, warning him that they have no time for those who aren't team-players, George just shakes his head. A simple, funny physical movement, played with and threaded through a neatly-structured plot so that it becomes funnier and funnier: that's why this show is comedy in its purest form.


 

Other episodes of Seinfeld take a casual allusion and gleefully turn it into a riff. A episode about Jerry being nagged by his parents to see Schindler's List (The Raincoats) sees the episode's other central plotline - Elaine's latest boyfriend Aaron and his overbearing friendship with Jerry's parents - turn into a reenactment of that film's climax, nicely performed by Judge Reinhold:

No, I could've called the travel agency, got them on another flight to Paris, I coulda got them out. [...] This watch, this watch could've paid for their whole trip. This ring, this ring is one more dinner I could've taken them out to. Water, they need some water They'll get dehydrated on the plane! Get the Seinfelds some water. Please! Please!





An episode that has seen Kramer act increasingly like a dog (The Andrea Doria) throughout ends with a full on Lassie parody. An episode about condo elections (The Cadillac) in Florida ends with Jerry's dad recreating Nixon's exit from the White House. The Wig Master is painstaking in its goal to have Kramer become a pimp. First, another of the episode's plot strands provides him with a silver cane, then another one provides him with a Technicolour Dreamcoat from a production of Joseph, then someone's hat is blown away by the wind, then Kramer catches it and puts it on, accompanied by appropriate music and hip members of New York's nightlife exchanging the equivalent of high-fives with him as he saunters along the streets before reaching his car, and inadvertently stumbles into another of the episode's plotlines: prostitutes have been using the carpark in which George and Kramer park their cars to "turn tricks". After a 'John' flees the car and a hooker attacks Kramer for frightening away her trade, Kramer is apprehended by the cops as he is fighting her off. The punchline to this joyous riff - and to the episode - is Kramer's poignant cry as his mugshot is taken: "I'm not a pimp!": a child caught playing at being grown-up.

  Then there are the extraordinary textures the writers can create from playing with the convoluted nature of comedy itself, using its ludicrousness as a strength rather than a weakness. In The Chinese Woman, George spots his father talking to a man in a cape, (a cameo by Larry David, adopting an unashamedly ludicrous posture), who turns out to be his divorce lawyer. After the inevitable Superman comparison (one of the few things Jerry's interested in), we end with a scene in which the subject of the episode's other plot (a woman Kramer has apparently got pregnant) is about to throw herself off a bridge. A caped figure sidles towards her and gently guides her away. "Who are you?" she asks. "I'm Frank Costanza's lawyer," he replies. There are no astonishing moments like this in British comedy these days, and few the other side of the Atlantic. The caped lawyer can't give any other answers because that's all there is to him. In my pieces on Family Guy and Father Ted, I tried to pinpoint those extraordinary poetic moments unique to comedy, in which the gag folds back upon itself, and the writers revel in everything undefinable about it. This is one such moment: the fact that the character has been created purely because it is amusing to have George's father hold mysterious meetings with a man in a cape, and that the only reason for his appearance on the bridge is that it makes aesthetic rather than logical sense as those are the 2 plots left to be joined up, are all allowed to shine and refract as if through a prism. The example from Father Ted I used was Dougal's line, after Ted has raised the question of why they don't just take the rabbits back to the pet shop he bought his from: "It was a travelling pet shop, Ted, they won't be back till spring." Other examples include Sideshow Bob's line in The Simpsons "Well if it isn't my sworn arch enemy Bart Simpson, and his sister Lisa to whom I'm fairly indifferent." and numerous lines in The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy such as this exchange:

Arthur: It's not so much an afterlife, more a sort of après vie
Zaphod: Hey, you dead guys! We're missing some ultra important thing here! Something somebody said and we missed it!
Arthur: I said it was more apres vie
Zaphod: Yeah, and Don't you wish you hadn't?



I love how that final line doesn't appear in the radio series, but was added for the TV series and the novel adaptation The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: an afterthought by Douglas Adams and an afterthought for the characters, acknowledging that they have to hear all these gags and don't always find them funny. All four examples use the way the gag works, the requirements of the gag, our expectations of that particular narrative and even the implausibilities it results in as walls to bounce the comedy off. They all parse earlier gags, and render everything funnier.

Other episodes take relish in distorting the shapes that we tend to associate with comedy narratives. The Bizarro Jerry sees Elaine encounter a group with the exact opposite qualities of Jerry, George and Kramer. Jerry makes the natural comparison with the Bizarro Superman. The episode ends with Bizarro Jerry saying "Me so happy, me want to cry" - we've gone from a reference to Bizarro Superman to using his very language, a quintessentially Seinfeld dynamic (the technique is one of displacement: compare it with the aforementioned climaxes to The Raincoats and The Cadillac, or The Jimmy, which starts with the title character's irritating habit of referring to himself in the first person, but by the end has George cathartically responding to his own storyline with "GEORGE IS GETTING UPSET!"). The Opposite sees George do the exact opposite of what he would normally do, resulting in the fortunes we've come to expect after five seasons being reversed. One has to marvel at Joe Queenan's bizarre claim that the sitcom has seen no innovation since the days of I Love Lucy: how can he say that when Seinfeld had such fun playing with the conventions and texture of the sitcom itself?

   Seinfeld is based around four people who aren't nice, demographically friendly or carefully constructed according to current audience interests, as those in Friends and The Big Bang Theory are. The scripts understand that not only are these not wonderful people: they aren't realistic either. What's most cloying about Friends and The Big Bang Theory is the constant insistence that these six people (in the case of TBBT it comes down to 2: girls and boys) are the only ones in the universe. Both those shows believe they are mimetic. Seinfeld, by contrast, revels in the fact that Kramer needs no job and yet has no money, that Elaine can't be bothered to keep up her anti-fur stance, that Jerry's "whole life revolves around cereals and Superman", that Jerry and Newman's enmity is little more than a kid's game that they both abandon when a more interesting game to play comes along. It also revels in the fact that these are not good people. To return to The Chicken Roaster, when Seth, jobless purely because of Jerry but bearing no grudge, is on his way out of Jerry's apartment, he picks up a newspaper and asks if he can keep it for the classifieds. Jerry replies "actually, I haven't read Tank McNamara yet..." and takes it back from him (Note that this occurs immediately after the "Moochie" line I mentioned earlier: in Seinfeld, these character details, grace notes, inflections, allusions to earlier lines and returns to earlier moments in a different key are combined to make comedic rainbows. It's why the delight the show gives never lessens after multiple viewings. You can watch it forever). The ingenious closing two-part episode - The Finale - was based around the idea that these are four odious individuals. They watch a fat man get carjacked with great amusement, and find themselves afoul of a new "Good Samaritan" law. They end up in prison, but the episode's tone is not self-consciously "dark": it's gleeful.

   The oddest thing about Seinfeld is the sublime effects they can get from Jerry Seinfeld's poor-yet-wonderful acting (Similar to the magnificent effects achieved by Larry David's awful-yet-brilliant acting in its sister show Curb Your Enthusiasm). This seems to be part of the same gag-parsing technique: when Jerry has to roar "Manya died - MANYA DIED!" out of a window in The Pony Remark, the phrase is made funnier by his inability to shout convincingly, as if the convoluted nature of a sitcom plot (Manya dies shortly after Jerry and Elaine offend her by saying they hate people who own or ever have owned ponies) is bounced back into the comic mix, strengthening rather than weakening it. It's because of this inexplicable effect that The Blood, in which Kramer has been storing blood everywhere, feels like a collision between Rabelais and Nabokov. When an accidentally-propelled scalpel falls toward Jerry, his whimper of terror sounds like a joke on the ridiculous nature of the moment. When he comes to and learns that Kramer has provided blood for a subsequent transfusion after the scalpel badly wounded him, all he can do is scream, and Kramer had no choice but to scream back. When the same thing happens with Newman stepping in as donor, all three of them scream. There's body horror here (Kramer has to store his blood in Jerry's car engine: it clots), and yet the script and actors are making us laugh at the absurd nature of that horror itself. If Jerry could scream convincingly, this effect would not be achieved. Jerry Seinfeld is actually a brilliant actor.

Jason Alexander as George Costanza gives one of the greatest performances in the history of television. As surely as with James Gandofini in The Sopranos or Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad, every little movement, every expression, just the way he walks into a room, tells us exactly what is going on inside his character's head. He brings tremendous rage and suffering to the part, outacting the entire cast of many 'serious' dramas. Consider the scene in The Boyfriend where George has given Jerry's address as his current place of employment, claiming to be a latex salesman for Art Vandelay. The unemployment office ring Jerry's apartment while George is using the bathroom, and Kramer answers. "VANDELAY! SAY VANDELAY!" roars George's voice from the bathroom. Kramer ignores him and tells them that they have the right address, but this is just an apartment. As he hangs up, George bursts in with his trousers round his ankles, and lies defeated on the floor. Jerry enters: "And you want to be my latex salesman...". Alexander's investment in his character is so intense, in the physicality of his rage and in his ability to perform pratfalls and emotion with equal integrity, that moments like this are simultaneously hysterically funny and a point at which we feel we know this person as well as anyone in fiction.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Elaine overcomes all of the stereotypes attached to women in comedy. Firstly, she's a natural clown: think of her and the first image that comes to mind might well be her signature violent shove while exclaiming "Get out...?", her inability to dance or the increasingly ludicrous facial expressions she pulls why saying "You think I have grace...?". Secondly, her character is as obnoxious and as base as the male ones, with none of the gender-essentialism of The Big Bang Theory or Friends. The gag about men who are "sponge-worthy" in The Sponge, her detestation of the sex scenes in The English Patient in the episode of that name ("Give me something I can use!") and her struggle to keep up with the no-masturbation competition in The Contest are the kind of vulgar comedy gold all often seen as the province of men (The Big Bang Theory, by contrast, sees the scenes with its female characters as the space for jokes about clothes-shopping, nail-varnish and Eat Pray Love).

When Michael Richards, as Kramer, made his entrance in the first episode of Seinfeld I ever saw - The Couch - my Dad, watching it with me, remarked, "oh God, there's the standard wacky neighbour: look at his funny haircut..." but a moment later, Kramer collided with a sofa a removal man was bringing in. He fell to the ground and leapt back up in an oddly graceful way. My dad chuckled:'"He did do that fall rather well, I must say -can we just rewind that?". That seems to me to capture the magic of Richards as Kramer, and its effect on the viewer: at first it seems to be standard sitcom shtick, then Richards plays it in a way no-one else could. His performance in The Jimmy is wonderful in a way nothing else has ever been. This imperishable episode sees Kramer mistaken for a mentally-challenged person after he's encountered with one side of his mouth still frozen by Novocaine following a dental appointment. He's invited to a charity dinner, where Mel Torme sings "When You're Smiling" to him. Kramer beams, and what makes this moment so delightful is the lack of deception: Kramer, after all, is indeed a special person, and didn't set out to give a false impression. The mixture of audacious bad taste and sweetness makes even the most po-faced viewer want to hug themselves: this as far away from Gervais-style cruelty as could be imagined, just as The Bubble Boy is interested more in the humour of an angry, raucous Bubble Boy (and in the poetry of saying "Bubble Boy") than in gags about his suffering.

 

The show's commitment to comedy aesthetics above everything else allows the characters to perform monologues of sustained power. Here's the climax of The Marine Biologist (in which George has been pretending to be a marine biologist to impress a girl, but been confronted by a beached whale which she implores him to save; and in which Kramer has been practicing his golf shots down by the beach):

   George: So I started to walk into the water. I won't lie to you boys, I was terrified! But I pressed on and as I made my way passed the breakers a strange calm came over me. I don't know if it was divine intervention or the kinship of all living things but I tell you Jerry at that moment I was a marine biologist! [...]

The sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to return soup at a deli. I got about fifty-feet out and then suddenly the great beast appeared before me. I tell ya he was ten stories high if he was a foot. As if sensing my presence he gave out a big bellow. I said, "Easy big fella!" And then as I watched him struggling I realized something was obstructing his breathing. From where I was standing I could see directly into the eye of the great fish!
Jerry: Mammal.
George: Whatever.
Kramer: Well, what did you do next?
George: Then from out of nowhere a huge title wave lifted, tossed like a cork and I found myself on top of him face to face with the blow-hole. I could barely see from all of the waves crashing down on top of me but I knew something was there so I reached my hand and pulled out the obstruction!
(George pulls out a golf ball)
Kramer (looking sheepishly at it for a while): What is that  - a Titleist? A hole in one, eh?
Jerry: Well, the crowd most have gone wild!
George: Oh yes, they did Jerry, they were all over me. It was like Rocky 1.
Diane came up to me, threw her arms around me, and kissed me. We both had tears streaming down our faces. I never saw anyone so beautiful. It was at that moment I decided to tell her I was not a marine biologist!
Jerry: Wow! What'd she say?
George: She told me to "Go to hell!" and I took the bus home.



Only comedy could create the effect that scene creates. The line "like an old man trying to send back soup in a Delhi," scans as gorgeously as poetry, and yet it's something other than poetry: it's irreducibly comedy.

Here's an equally brilliant vehicle for Michael Richards from The Fire:

KRAMER: she ran out of the building and a street sweeper ran over her foot and severed her pinky toe.
GEORGE: That's unbelievable!
KRAMER: Yeah! Then after the ambulance left, I found the toe! So I put it in a Cracker Jack box, filled it with ice, and took off for the hospital.
GEORGE: You ran?
KRAMER: No, I jumped on the bus. I told the driver, "I got a toe here, buddy - step on it."
GEORGE: Holy cow!
KRAMER: Yeah, yeah, then all of a sudden, this guy pulls out a gun. Well, I knew any delay is gonna cost her her pinky toe, so I got out of the seat and I started walking towards him. He says, "Where do you think you're going, Cracker Jack?" I said, "Well, I got a little prize for ya, buddy - knocked him out cold!
GEORGE: How could you do that?!
KRAMER: Then everybody is screamin,' because the driver, he's passed out from all the commotion...the bus is out of control! So, I grab him by the collar, I take him out of the seat, I get behind the wheel and now I'm drivin' the bus.
GEORGE: You're Batman.
KRAMER: Yeah. Yeah, I am Batman. Then the mugger, he comes to, and he starts chokin' me! So I'm fightin' him off with one hand and I kept drivin' the bus with the other, y'know? Then I managed to open up the door, and I kicked him out the door with my foot, you know - at the next stop.
JERRY: You kept makin' all the stops?
KRAMER: Well, people kept ringin' the bell!



This is a show famous for its "no hugging, no learning" rule, yet television has never been more joyous. The only emotion involved here is the warmth we experience when we experience great comedy.

Only two moments in the entire series allow the characters to express emotion towards one another. One is the scene in The Deal where Kramer gives Elaine the bench she wanted as a birthday present, along with a birthday card that quotes Yeats. Even this moment has a sting, though, as it drops Jerry in it for not getting Elaine anything. The second moment comes in The Wallet when Elaine returns after Julia Louis-Dreyfus has taken a few episodes off due to pregnancy. The four cheer and rejoice in a way that stays funny rather than schmaltzy, but there's still an uncharacteristic note of warmth.

Jerry's parents are highly skillful creations in this regard. It's been noted that Jerry is unusual as a protagonist in a sitcom for whom things work out, and crucial to this is his having relatively relaxed parents. They're  necessarily gentler than George's, but the achievement of Barney Martin and Liz Sheridan's performances as Morty and Helen Seinfeld is that they still make them funny. The scene in The Shower Head where Elaine demands that Helen provide a urine sample to help her cheat on a drugs test gains a curious comic edge from the latter's lack of offence, instead getting flustered about which glass she should use.   Even the scene in The Outing where they phone Jerry after rumors that he and George are a couple are circulating demonstrates that they are vexed -  "it's those damn culottes you made him wear when he was five!" - rather than offended. The episode's iconic line "not that there's anything wrong with that" sounds particularly natural coming from Liz Sheridan, setting us up for what it will sound like when Estelle Harris gets to say it. Helen and Morty succeed as creations because they reinforce the idea that Jerry has had irritatingly little to be concerned about (as he says in The Serenity Now, "I'm open, there's just nothing in there") as a source of humour, and so his parents are not demons like the Costanzas (not to mention the comedy gold that ensues when both sets of parents clash). Few comedies would be able to use a mother's unironic "how can anyone not like him?" (The Wallet) for comic effect, let alone as a catchphrase (not that its depiction of older people is rose-tinted - See The Cadillac for a splendidly acid portrayal of bitchiness and political rivalry among the elderly.)

 A more typical moment comes in The Serenity Now, when Jerry decides to try his hand at emotion: "What is this salty discharge?" he says upon shedding his first tears. He then insists upon opening up to George, who eventually relents and tells Jerry " All of my darkest fears, everything I'm capable of. That's me." Jerry stares in horror: "Yikes. Well, good luck with all that. [...] I think you scared me straight." Even eerier is the moment in the season seven finale The Invitations, when George's fiancé Susan, nicely played by Heidi Swedberg who gets us rooting for her, has been fatally poisoned by licking poor-quality envelopes when sending out wedding initiations (George insisted on the cheaper ones). The others react to the news, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus delivering the line "I'm...so sorry, George...?" as if Elaine is baffled rather than moved. It's the eeriest moment in Seinfeld's history.

Yet, to reiterate, this is not a "dark" sitcom. It's not designed for the "this makes me squirm and therefore it must be funny" school of comedy criticism. It revels in its own artificiality, realising that its characters and plots are driven by the requirements of comedy, not just human observation. This is what makes it the opposite of Friends. Seinfeld acknowledges that Susan's death happens because it's funny, while Friends can't help but see Ross cheating on Rachel as the worst thing in the world. Douglas Adams said of PG Wodehouse "He doesn't have to be serious - he's better than that." Here's a show that was never serious, except in its artistry, and consequently created a world.

Leave Douglas Adams Alone: A Plea

Have you ever thought how much better it would be if Jane Austen had written more than six novels? What a shame it is that more writers aren't writing books with her characters? No, me neither. So why must we endure this Douglas Adams industry, with lesser writers producing novelisations of his tv scripts and sequels to his novels, clumsy radio adaptations of his more problematic books using the cast of his brilliant radio series, and dreadful film and tv adaptations of his unique work?

The beauty of Douglas Adams' oeuvre is its deceptive size: seven novels, 3 of which are flawed, one magnificent radio series, two Doctor Who stories, one of which is the greatest in the show's history, another of which is a mixed bag, one non-fiction book and other delightful bits and pieces. It seems small, and yet its rereadable wisdom puts many prolific writers to shame. Back off, Eoin Colfer, Gareth Roberts, Dirk Maggs. You know not what you do. Don't give me "Douglas would have loved it" or "I tried to do justice to Dougie's genius" or "of course no-one can write like Douglas"... If you're that self-deprecative, how about putting down the fucking pen? Good intentions don't make books better, nor do they make up for adding book-length graffiti to such a beautiful mural. This miasma of fond remembrance, affection and goodwill is blinding us to the considerable value of Adams's work. Affection for an author is nice, but not as important as respect.

Here are some dire predictions for the next ten years.

1) some bastard will finish off Salmon of Doubt. It's happened before (Chandler's Poodle Springs, Austen's Sandition, Edwin Drood), only here the words "tried to write something Douglas would had enjoyed" will be deployed.

2) A City of Death novelisation: oh God: There is actually one writer other than Adams who could have done justice to the tv masterpiece: unfortunately PG Wodehouse isn't available either. [This is happening. Gareth "not Douglas Adams" Roberts has pulled out, and James "not PG Wodehouse" Goss is doing it instead.]


3) Pirate Planet novelisation: I can see the afterword already: "Douglas never thought it was as good but I think he was too harsh...tried to do something Douglas would have liked...I'd never presume to be able to write like Douglas Adams but..."

4)Doctor Who and the Krikketmen book or audio play: Wouldn't they just love to get Tom Baker for the latter? Probably lot of supporting actors from Adams-related productions too. The fact that Adams previously used this for his (underrated) third Hitch-Hiker novel Life, the Universe and Everything won't deter them (Shada had already been used in his first Dirk Gently novel, but that didn't deter Roberts. Maggs's Life, The Universe and Everything adaptation featured an excruciating moment when a gag had Adams had adapted - the "imagine I have a blaster In my hand" / "You do have a blaster in your hand" exchange - from radio to book was adapted straight back).

5) If Colfer and Roberts don't want to do any more, other writers will join the party: Charlie Higson? Anthony Horowitz? James Moran? Neil Gaiman? Jenny Colgan? (Look at Higson's introduction for the Doctor Who Target novelisations for a textbook example of jumping in on a bandwagon he's openly not a fan of)

6) Some variation on Out of the Trees. Adams's broadcast-and-then-lost one-off collaboration with Graham Chapman - [which has now been rediscovered] -  didn't result in a further series. Imagine the behind-the-scenes feature: "Douglas never thought it was that good but I think he's being too harsh on himself. So I called up Steven Mangan..."

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go now and reread some Douglas Adams. I don't mean the stuff coming out that's got his name on the cover: I mean the words of one of my favourite writers, whose work throws up new delights on each rereading, but which some seem to think needs adding to.

How Steven Moffat ruined Doctor Who

(update here: http://richardhcooper.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/steven-and-women-or-how-steven-moffat.html )

River Song is right: this is the Doctor's darkest hour. Doctor Who has been many things in its 48 years - including terrible - but now under Steven Moffat it is suffering the worst fate of all: it's become static. Moffat, having already written for all four seasons of the Russell T Davies-led version of the show, has discovered what the public, TV critics and Doctor Who fandom will accept, and unlike the show's 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner, who sporadically tried to do the same thing, he's competent enough to get away with it. You won't find any episodes that will embarrass some viewers or unsettle fandom, but neither will you be confounded, disturbed or challenged.

This version, week after week, is exactly what we expect from Doctor Who: darkly-lit "spooky" sets, monsters, hurried technobabble, the claim that the whole universe will be destroyed, and the cutest, safest, most unsurprising and least interesting Doctor ever devised, with his zany hats, his adorable little bowtie, his comedy catchphrases and his funny little stories about all the famous historical people he's met. Congratulations are due to all those fans who complained that 2006's Love and Monsters was too silly (and perhaps too idiosyncratic, too different, too affecting, too interesting?) and that Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor took it too seriously and didn't look right: you've won, and those of us who like intelligent tv have lost.

Almost everything that went wrong with Doctor Who in 2010 was detectable in the 2005-2009 version. Some weren't necessarily bad things to begin with, but have merely atrophied through lack of movement, and an unwillingness to bring things forward. There is perhaps one difference. A strength and also a weakness of Russell T Davies's version was his lack of interest in science fiction. Guest star Timothy Dalton described his aesthetic particularly well as 2001 one moment, Coronation Street the next. Scenes of alien invasion and monsters would be countered by nicely-observed details about mothers who check you've got the receipt when thanking you for a Christmas present. At its best, this technique adds verisimilitude, increases our affection for these characters and helps with the suspension of disbelief. At its worst, it can result in sloppy plotting. Stories like The Parting of the Ways and The End of Time felt right emotionally, with the characters, sacrifices and departures well-handled, but on a second viewing it is hard to tolerate the contemptuous way Davies handles the unconvincing McGuffins and the Doctor's breezy way of explaining how they work. For better and for worse, Davies was more interested in people than in science fiction. Moffat, on the other hand, is a geek. Let's clarify these terms. A major disservice done to SF/Fantasy is the way it is frequently confused with its duller brother, Geekery. SF/Fantasy is about the universe, the human race's responsibilities, morality, life, death, fear, wonder, (proper) science and different ways of seeing things. Geekery is about things which not only don't exist literally, but have no metaphorical value: bullshit science, people who come back to life after being killed off, different versions of time-travellers bumping into each other in different timelines and CGI "energy" emanating from people when the plot requires it.

In a work of Geekery, the text itself is fetishised: it might not raise any questions, tax the intellect or interest anyone other than fans, but at least geeks can watch it, and discuss who River Song really is, whether Batman and the Joker are mirror opposites of one another, what would happen if the Enterprise's transporters malfunctioned and what Yoda's midichlorian count is. It's a lovely way for nice, often wonderful people to meet, but that's that's the sole value. Few could argue convincingly that The Impossible Astronaut/The Day of the Moon or The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang have anything to stimulate the intellect, anything in the way of coherent, structured narrative, or a smidgeon of originality, but fans can enjoy debating who River Song is, whether the dead future Doctor can be saved, what caused the cracks in time, and why Amy's pregnancy is in a state of temporal flux.

These questions have nothing to do with drama. Let's not delude ourselves that we're talking about complexity here, either: admitting "I had no idea what was going on" carries an implication that this is because the scriptwriter was cleverer than than you, but as Chris Weston pointed out in Emine Saner's fine discussion of the show in The Guardian recently, a child's scribble may be hard to decode, but hardly complex. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mulholland Drive, Memento and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian are difficult because they're rich: there's more going on aesthetically than can be understood literally, hence the rewards gained by subsequent viewings or readings. The Big Bang, The Day of the Moon and The Wedding of River Song may be hard to follow, but they are also predictable, contrived, vacuous and full of plot holes. Guy Ritchie's notorious film Revolver is pretty hard to follow too, but that's hardly a case of more things going on in Ritchie's head than one can take in on the first viewing.

If Moffat has another idea, it's his wearisome take on Doctor Who as a fairy tale. He argues that Doctor Who isn't really science fiction, but a story that takes place "under children's beds". The supposedly subversive juxtaposition of fairy tales and modernity, and all those cute little truisms about how children prefer fairy tales dark, because it's the parents that want them expurgated, has been around for long enough now. In the years since Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment and the ascension of writers of "dark fairy tales" like Neil Gaiman into the mainstream, this has changed from a juxtaposition to a given. Is it really subversive to put monsters in a child's bedroom any more? Otherwise, Moffat has kept everything from Russell T Davies's version that so desperately needed to be jettisoned. . Let's look past the music that drowns out the dialogue, the desperate reliance on the sonic screwdriver as a magic wand, the need for triumphant endings in which the monster is humilated as the music swells (The Day of the Moon was a big offender here) the rushed nature of the 45-minute format, the constant claim the whole universe will be destroyed only for a reset button to put if off until the next series and the dependence on monsters. Its biggest hindrance is the reliance on arc plotting. In the first Russell T Davies series, the words “Bad Wolf” were hidden in several episodes. This wasn't intrusive, even if it did hamper the end of the series with too much expectation upon one phrase. By the time of Davies's final full season this had grown out of control. Each episode would contain references to the fact that "all the bees have disappeared", disappearing planets and something called the "Medusa Cascade", and in the season finale the lucky viewers were told what these things meant. This "Sesame Street was brought to you today by the letter A" style of television is a serious menace to quality drama, and the art of fiction itself. It's flourished in America, with shows like Desperate Housewives, Flashforward, Heroes, Lost and 24 teaching viewers to judge tv in terms of how good the thing they think might happen in the next episode will be, rather than how good the episode they just watched was. Obviously, we are setting ourselves up for a fall by convincing ourselves that these questions will be answered satisfactorily, but more worrying is the way that we tolerate mediocrity because we convince ourselves the finale will be triumphant.

It breaks my heart to think that while viewers of such 1970s season-closing Doctor Who stories like Inferno or The Talons of Weng-Chiang would be saying to one another excitedly "wasn't that good?", the current generation say to one another "what have we learnt so far?". Moffat has gone a step further than Davies by giving this arc fetish a face, in the form of River Song. River exists to tell us something more exciting will happen later on. She even uses "Spoilers!" as an intolerably smug catchphrase. When we first meet her, she is at the end of her life (though Moffat even fudges that by having the Doctor 'save' her consciousness and upload it to a virtual reality world where she can live forever - how did that get past the first draft?). The Doctor subsequently meets her at earlier and earlier points in her life. There's much emphasis on who she is, how often she's met the Doctor, what role she will play in his future, but is there really a character there?

Instead we get a lot of adolescent scenes of a vaguely vampish woman with a laser gun shooting people while exchanging cutesy flirtatious banter (her other catchphrase is the truly vile "Hello sweetie!"). Is there a single reason to care about her? What has she done except shoot people, flirt in a way that Moffat seems to think evokes Lauren Bacall but comes across like someone's drunken aunt at a wedding, and occasionally claim to be an archaeologist? It builds up to the single most disastrous plot twist ever devised: the revelation that River is Amy Pond's baby daughter grown up. Its meaningless is spectacular: it's too remote to make any emotional or metaphorical impact, and it doesn't actually alter this drab character or raise any questions. Even Amy's loss of the baby, abducted not long after birth, turns out to carry no emotional weight. Amy and her husband Rory go through whole episodes barely mentioning it, including the episode The Girl Who Waited where we meet a future Amy abandoned for 36 years: clearly post-natal depression isn't a factor in Moffat's universe. That this is supposedly because they've met River as a grown-up and know she'll survive is an extraordinary indictment of just how little interest in character motivation Moffat has, making a nonsense of the recent defence by one of his writers, Gareth Roberts, that the show was only a challenge for viewers to follow because of its "emotional complexity". Moffatt warned that this would be a "game-changing" cliffhanger, splitting the season into two while we supposedly waited in suspense, but what kind of game was this before, and how is this any different now?

When Moffat isn't focusing on what will happen at the end of the series, he's relying on cliches to sustain stand-alone episodes by other writers. Let's have a pirate episode. Let's have a vampire episode. Let's have a spooky hotel like in The Shining. Let's meet Churchill. This is the now rather congealed template laid down by Davies, who would present his writers with what he called a "Shopping list", believing that a cliche can sustain the atmosphere, characters and plot of a whole episode. The Lazarus Experiment in series three is the result of Davies specifying "Marvel comics" and "mad scientist" (the best of Davies's and Moffat's own earlier episodes, by contrast, delighted by creating their own tropes: rhino police on the Moon, clockwork robots obsessed with Madame De Pompadour, people whose faces turn into gasmasks, Ardal O'Hanlon as a catperson in flying goggles stuck in a traffic jam of flying cars. You've never seen any of those things before).By the time of The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People on Moffat's watch, we've reached the stage where the show is too cliche-encrusted to have anything to say. This episode tackles cloning. A group of cloned "flesh avatars" of factory workers - used like fork-lift trucks for hazardous work - are inadvertently rendered sentient. Consider this heartfelt monologue by one of them:

My name is Jennifer Lucas. I'm not a factory part. I had toast for my breakfast, I wrote a letter to my mum [...] I am Jennifer Lucas. I remember everything that happened in her entire life. Every birthday, every childhood illness. I feel everything she's ever felt, and more. I'm not a monster! I am me!Me! Me! Me!

There's little verisimilitude here: The obvious points that any piece of science fiction on the subject of cloning have had to deal with are regurgitated. Blade Runner and Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go found more provocative, moving and artistically innovative ways of exploring this (even the trashy film Total Recall did far more interesting things with the concept of memories as the source of identity), but in MoffatWorld these films and books are as good as unread and unwatched. Without any interest in what has been done in this field before, or any desire to tackle it from a fresh perspective, all the show can do is run through a series of stock questions, supposed dilemmas and would-be surprise revelations for each subgenre - in this case, that a clone would have the same memories, that a clone would regard themselves as the same person , and a twist regarding who is the clone and who is the original. One can predict the same plodding results for any 'issue' the show tackles.

As for Vampires of Venice and The Curse of the Black Spot, what could one possibly find to say about them? These are episodes forged from solid cliche. Regarding the former, the first misgivings I experienced about Moffat's tenure were upon seeing a clip from it on a chatshow. We see standard Hammer-Horror vampire babes in the white night-dresses we all know they have to wear (because they're vampires, right?) , and the Doctor notices they have no reflection. Amazingly this is strung out, with the Doctor checking the mirror several times, as if it were genuinely shocking and dramatic, rather than a given. The latter is a pirate story. We know this because it's got pirate hats, and cutlass fights, and treasure, and a enchanting sea-siren, and pirates doing evil laughs, and a scene where the characters have to walk the plank. And the Doctor gets to say "Yo-ho-ho!". As for the tired "revelations"' in both these episodes that they're not really vampires or sirens after all, but aliens and a spacecraft's malfunctioning Medical computer respectively, one wonders how much longer series is going to rely on that cyber-Scooby Doo routine, done brilliantly in The Empty Child and The Girl In the Fireplace - Moffat's excellent first two stories for Davies's version - but now so predictable.

Why, then, are we hearing so little about this desecration, as one of the greatest tv series ever devised is reduced to something so snarmy, battery-farmed and philistine? Firstly, it's because there's a common assumption throughout all media that popular culture, unlike literature, is not worth intelligent critique - a problem exacerbated by the death of tv criticism. When Philip Roth publishes a novel, it's subjected to a plethora of reviews of widely varying opinions, and despite Roth's reputation few critics seem afraid to voice dissent. Mark Kermode and Kim Newman recently made the same point about this within days of each other. Newman observed on Twitter that when he expressed disappointment with the latest Conan the Barbarian movie, he was met with admonishments of the familiar "what were you expecting, Citizen Kane?" variety, while Kermode, promoting his book on the declining quality of Hollywood blockbusters, also observed that this excuse is used for the era of Michael Bay. Doctor Who fans face the same quandary: if we point out the script's limitations, the stock response is that it's only for children, it's only a bit of fun, what did we expect? The Wire? Dennis Potter? Stephen Fry, a fan of modern Who, unintentionally demonstrated this with his comments in the Q and A following his delivery of the 2010 BAFTA Annual Television Lecture:

The only drama the BBC will boast about are Merlin and Doctor Who, which are fine, but they're children's programmes. They're not for adults.[...] like a chicken nugget. Every now and again we all like it … But if you are an adult you want something surprising, savoury, sharp, unusual, cosmopolitan, alien, challenging, complex, ambiguous, possibly even slightly disturbing and wrong.

What's interesting is not merely that Fry sees no gulf between Doctor Who and Merlin, but that even a fan of the show is under no illusions as to how far it is from intelligent drama. It's curious that it doesn't seem to strike him that Doctor Who might be surprising, savoury, sharp, unusual, cosmopolitan, alien, challenging, complex, ambiguous, possibly even slightly disturbing and wrong if it were better-written. The myth that you can't have ambiguity, depth and decent plotting because it might put off the kiddies should surely have been disproved after decades of the extraordinary work of Lewis Carroll, Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett and Alan Garner.

The second reason is that Moffat is a cynic rather than an incompetent. Nathan-Turner's worst decisions: putting question marks on the Doctor's clothes to denote mystery, giving Colin Baker's Doctor a multicoloured costume, casting Dolores Gray as a 'celebrity' cameo for the 25th anniversary, bringing back a Cyberleader from a 1960s story with an unrecognisable costume and an unrecognisable voice but the same actor squeezed inside - alienated the public as much as the fans, hence the three seasons from 1986 to 1988 that saw the the entire show retooled and reformatted three times to try and counter the unpopularity of the previous season.

Moffat, however, knows how to push buttons. His Doctor is so carefully, almost admirably, tailor-made, it could be a brand name. Following the David Tennant model, it's the same mixture of cute good looks, with a patina of geek chic, vaguely professorish but not so much it would alienate the girls and still with the hint of an action hero beneath the foppish lock of hair (looking at Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock in Moffat's other "take a tried-and-tested character and do it safely and cutely" show, one wonders if Moffat is growing thousands of these guys in a vat somewhere), the costume with its reassuring resemblance to Tennant's, the bowtie to remind us that he's eccentric without rendering him unattractive or unusual.

The Hartnell-to Eccleston Doctor (perhaps with the exception of Paul McGann in the 1996 American tv movie, a forerunner of Matt Smith's focus-group Doctor, both of them personifying the vaguest Platonic conception of Doctorishness) was a figure who embraced, represented and investigated the different. He wasn't always comforting, didn't always win everyone around, and wasn't a galactic celebrity. There's a terrific moment in 1970's Inferno when, during an ever-mounting crisis, someone says "That's not what the Doctor says", to which another character sneers "who cares what he thinks?", and the first speaker roars "I do: he talks a lot of good sense!" This moment is exciting and emotionally involving precisely because the audience has not been sated with details of the Doctor's nobility, and not that many of the cast have had kind words for the Doctor: the viewer feels an emotional pull as something important but largely ignored is acknowledged.

From Tennant onwards, the Doctor became a much more conventional, sanitised figure: an action hero, and a pin-up. When Moffat cast the 11th Doctor, after publicly hinting he would cast an older actor, he cast a younger version of Tennant, and built the the whole programme around the Doctor's ability to kick arse and monsters' realisations that they'd messed with the wrong guy. "If you value your continued existence, if you have any plans about seeing tomorrow, there's one thing you never, ever put in a trap... ME!!" he sneers at one point. It sounds like the Incredible Hulk (you won't like the Doctor when he's angry) and Liam Neeson in Taken, but not much like a non-violent, xenophiliac Timelord who regards fighting fire with fire as a contemptible human delusion.

The very first episode of Moffat's reign, The Eleventh Hour, ended with the Doctor defeating alien opponents by reminding them who he was, a bizarre moment of creative hubris Moffat previously succumbed to in Forest of the Dead, his last episode for Davies's version. And yet turning the Doctor into a cute but macho figure who might as well flash a badge to scare all disagreeables away makes a horrible kind of sense. When producer Piers Wenger, promoting the 2011 season, named Twilight as an influence, he knew what he was doing. It may have made your teeth grind if you cared about quality tv, but by God he knew what he was doing. The original Doctor Who was the show that tried. With no CGI, little time for reshoots and largely studio-bound resources, it attempted to create worlds inside your living room. It wanted its viewers to use their imaginations, not only to improve on the variable special effects illustrating compelling concepts (Robert Shearman, who wrote for the show in 2005, commented on a DVD feature for 1981's Kinda that it wasn't let down for him as a child viewer by the extremely poor giant snake because he could see that it represented a much more powerful concept of Evil. I prefer that to a piece of CGI that represents nothing, like Prisoner Zero in The Eleventh Hour) but to extend their empathy, to embrace the alien and reject the parochial. After making you believe that the secrets of the universe could be concealed in a police box in a junkyard, it tried to convince you that a race of intelligent reptiles found hibernating in a cave in Derbyshire were no more aliens than the human race were, that patriotism can blind as well as strengthen, that the world is more important than a country, that science beats superstition and that you should never be afraid of changing, learning, disobeying and growing. That's the little show that tried. Moffat's Doctor Who is the big show that doesn't need to try. If you don't believe me, get hold of a DVD of Carnival of Monsters, a Doctor Who story from 1973, and see how writer Robert Holmes relies on a protagonist and an audience with enquiring minds, rather than a macho action hero who scares away anything uncozy and an audience the writer is frightened of boring. Instead of reassuring pop-culture jokes every five minutes, loud incidental music to tell us what to feel and action-movie setpieces to keep the audience from watching ITV1, this story cares about atmosphere.

First the Doctor and his companion Jo arrive onboard the SS Bernice in the early 20th Century, only to find the crew's memory is affected and they are repeating the same actions Groundhog Day-style, while on an alien planet we a see a bunch of bureaucratic aliens bicker with a couple of travelling carnival performers as they attempt to bring a "miniscope", which miniaturises lifeforms and displays them in a zoological peepshow, through customs. The SS Bernice is attacked by a dinosaur. After escaping through a hatch in the ship, the Doctor and Jo find themselves in open marshland surrounded by ferocious wild alien beasts known as Drashigs, and realise they are in the Miniscope. The bureaucratic aliens squabble about the threat of infection posed by the lifeforms in the miniscope, only for one of one of the little creatures (the Doctor, of course) to break free from it, grow to full-size and berate them. This imperishable story creates worlds within worlds inside the viewer's head which will always be with them. It uses a child viewer's imaginative potential to question what's outside - not merely regarding Drashigs, but what's outside the realms of bureaucracy, xenophobia and cruelty to what seem to blinkered minds smaller creatures.

Try also 1977's The Talons of Weng-Chiang, a story which should, by rights, be disposable, being a mixture of every Victorian pulp cliche imaginable: a Fu Manchu style villain, a phantom beneath the opera (or theatre on this occasion) an evil ventrioquist's dummy, a killer praying on ladies of the night, a giant Rat, the Doctor in a deerstalker, a pathologist acting as an amiable Watson figure, a music-hall proprieter with a love of alliterative vernacular. Instead, our affection for the latter two characters - Litefoot and Jago - is allowed to increase, so that the story takes on a new dimension when they finally meet, and the explanation of who the shadowy Weng-Chiang really is (Magnus Greel, 51st Century war criminal, failed time traveller and "The Butcher of Brisbane") is allowed to let the story glide into a genuinely evocative and solidly imagined vision of the future. Magnus Greel, Jago and Litefoot are the heart and soul of the story, not the rat or the running around, and the sonic screwdriver is nowhere to be seen. One of the greatest scenes in Talons is the scene where Litefoot has been left alone with the Doctor's companion Leela, a savage from another world. The two have supper. Leela hurls herself upon the cold collation left out by Litefoot's housekeeper with the ferocity of her tribe. Litefoot stares, stunned but too polite to complain. Leela notices: "aren't you going to eat?" Smiling nervously, Litefoot delicately copies her eating habits, and attempts to offer her cutlery. Leela takes only the knife: "It's a good knife". No loud music is used to tell us this is funny and charming because it clearly is. Actors Louise Jameson and Trevor Baxter underplay the comedy, and the dialogue doesn't need to spell out the parallels with Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. We're in the quiet atmosphere of a Victorian drawing room getting to know these characters. If The Talons of Weng-Chiang had been done by Moffat and his team, none of these things would be so, but the giant rat would look better.

A third recommendation would be 1979's City of Death by Douglas Adams, possibly the greatest Doctor Who story: watch it and experience how a piece of writing so frothy and unashamedly light and funny is plotted, structured, acted, designed and directed with such attention, intelligence and respect, and how a frivolous little comedy can be so nuanced, so aesthetically rich and so full of ideas, patterns and rhythms that it never fades no matter how often you see it. This most tongue-In-cheek of all Doctor Who stories (though Douglas Adams hated that phrase: he worked at his comedy) seals off the excuse so commonly used for The Curse of the Black Spot and Vampires of Venice: "but it's only a bit of fun." That didn't stop Douglas Adams and Robert Holmes from writing brilliantly.

But while Adams and Holmes obviously outstrip anything from the Moffat era, let's remember something more surprising: Nathan-Turner trumps him too. Oh, his reign saw far more laughable stories than Moffat's, I admit, but, to adapt another piece of trailerspeak from River Song, he fell so much further and rose so much higher. His Doctor Who was brilliant one week, terrible the next, and I prefer that to the consistent standard of inoffensive, solidly-made mediocrity which distinguishes the current version. Nathan-Turner is best seen as the crazy old uncle who bequeathed you some wonderful stuff up in the attic - it hardly matters there's a load of broken coat-hangers up there as well. Years later, the best stories of Nathan-Turner's era - Ghost Light, The Caves of Androzani, Kinda, Remembrance Of the Daleks, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Survival, Revelation of the Daleks, The Curse of Fenric - continue to delight and surprise in fresh ways, whilst we're forgotting about Vampires Of Venice and Night Terrors as we speak (and who remembers the plot of The Eleventh Hour?)

Should Doctor Who be scrapped? Never: what's the point of replacing it with any other science fiction or fantasy series when it has the most versatile format imaginable: no fixed cast, a craft small enough to fit anywhere that can travel in space and time, and no limitations on genre. Its one recurring theme is the power of the imagination, both in its potential for creating new worlds in the head that linger, and for creating new ways of empathising, understanding and seeing. Doctor Who at is best was an anthology show: a gritty thriller about petty warfare and gunrunning (Caves of Androzani), a complex Buddhist parable on colonialism and evil with feminist undertones (Kinda), a blackly comic story about evolution and late Victorian Britain (Ghost Light), a witty tale of two conmen who pretend to sell people planets (The Ribos Operation): this show could give us everything. People often love their country the most when they're struggling under the dictator. One day, when Moffat's gone, a new version of Doctor Who will be made. It will be the best tv show of all time. It was before.