Bullying and Fandom: Why Caitlin Moran must publicly apologise for her treatment of Mildred Bobbin, and why anyone who cares about fandom must hold her to account.

I've seen something none too pleasant in the attitude of those in power towards fandom over the past seven days. To recap, at the BFI premiere of the new series of BBC One's Sherlock on December 15, Caitlin Moran humiliated a Sherlock  fanfic writer - who writes under the name Mildred Bobbin -  by plucking her "slashfic" story off the internet (without permission) and forcing stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman to read it out while writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, producer Sue Vertue and director Jeremy Lovering  looked on (a video of part of it is here, an account is here, and Mildred Bobbin's admirable response is here)    Now, I wouldn't watch Sherlock in a million years (I think I'd prefer Basil The Great Mouse Detective or that version of Hound of the Baskervilles Cook and Moore did everyone hates), and fanfic isn't something I'm interested in. But you know what's really harmful about people writing fanfic? What's contemptible about people writing fanfic? Because I don't. It seems as pointless a reason to ridicule someone as if they enjoyed knitting, collecting toy soldiers, breakdancing or Origami. It's a harmless activity people do for fun. Why should people who practice it be humiliated, and how is singling them out for such public humiliation kicking upwards?

Let's also not forget an important point here: Mildred Bobbin's blogpost makes it quite clear that piece was written for her own amusement and that of her friends: this is not a debate about the literary merits of fanfiction (I'd be the first to admit it's only recreational). She's horrified the cast were made to read it and, touchingly, begins her piece by focusing on the embarrassment that she thinks it caused Freeman and Cumberbatch.

   Caitlin Moran's books come adorned with blurbs from Lauren Laverne, Jonathan Ross and Nigella Lawson telling us how "cool" she is. Now she's taken her role as the kid at school surrounded by adoring sycophants telling you you could hang out with them if you didn't wear your hair like that, and what are you reading that for, that's saaaaad. Look at this piece by her sneering at Red Dwarf in 2006. It's not just the flatness of its prose, the blank witlessness of the insults directed at the show's writers, cast and fans  and the lack of any argument, but the way the piece acts as a rallying cry to all those who are anxious to declare they're not sad, not obsessive and not virgins.

Paul Cornell once rightly pointed out that part of the magic of the Sylvester McCoy era of Doctor Who was that it was a bullied era: to this day the mention of it is interrupted by the endless jeers of people who've never seen an episode from that period (which includes some of the finest Doctor Who stories to date), who are terrified of any interests that aren't shared by a majority,  and instead find great sustenance in buzz-words (low-budget, embarrassing, sad,  Kandyman, Vision-on, umbrella, hat). To them, the world is a circle with the words "received opinions" inside, and terrifyingly nerdy wastelands outside (do you really think it's a coincidence they've been so keen to pretend science fiction is a cult? As this excellent SOTCAA piece  puts it, people sneering at "anoraks" "virgins" "trainspotters" "nerds" and "obsessives" are simultaneously finding safety-in-numbers by declaring themselves part of a fun-loving majority, not too interested in anything, not taking anything too seriously, not unusual in any way, only annoyed or passionate about things if they know the majority is too, never watching or reading anything unfashionable. When Richard Bacon tweeted, following the broadcast of a Matt Smith Doctor Who story, "what must Sylvester McCoy think when he's watching that?", when Jonathan Ross roared with derision on his chatshow when Billie Piper spiritedly defended Doctor Who Magazine,  and the Radio Times editorial launching the 2010 series promised us that we need not worry because Matt Smith was "no Sylvester McCoy", both were doing nothing other than reasserting their "coolness", their conformity, their lack of anything suspicious. They shelter behind the bigger kids in the class, and let the majority choose their preferences for them, rather than have to think about things. 

At the same time as he was studiously avoiding any allusions to the Moran incident, Cornell himself tweeted: "Oh, so it's bad when Shia LaBeouf steals someone else's work, internet, but not when you illegally download something. Fine", and argued yet again with fans about piracy and how it hurts SF writers. He's talked in the past about his dislike for the tendency of bigger fandoms to look down on others, such as when they sneer at Twilight fans. He's also defended fanfic here. He's a keen viewer of Sherlock and follower of debates within fandom so he knows about  the BFI incident. Until he comments on what Moran did, Cornell can no longer claim to be interested in fandom and bullying.

I blundered into a disagreement over Moran with a published Doctor Who author, Mags L Halliday, after she tweeted this:

Oh, @caitlinmoran I know you weren't out for the Sherlock fanficcers. Sometimes fans forget [what] they don't actually own [heart shape] cf Dr Who

She insisted to me that fanfic writers had to accept that:

If you write fanfic you have no, NO, right to complain about someone using you work: you used someone else's first.[...] I think, if ficcers claim their work is fair use of copyrighted ideas then @caitlinmoran can claim fair use of fanfic.

 Where's the empathy? Is it really that hard to understand that there may be a difference between having your book reviewed and having something written for the amusement of yourself and an online circle mocked onstage at the BFI? Does Halliday really deny the existence of context? How jaded do you have to be to not find Mildred Bobbin's account of her humiliation, and the attack on the simple pleasure writing fanfic brought her, sincere?

 Then James Cooray Smith,  another author of  Doctor Who books and another familiar part of the Who online community,  crashed into this conversation with this revolting series of misogynistic tweets:

Someone puts their work out there, they accept the responses it generates. That's the deal. That includes ridicule. It's interesting from a pathological POV that those who scream loudest about their own rights as fanficcers being above reproach are often the first to SCREAM at someone else's work. Fantitled children.

It particularly goes for those who've confused creativity with public onanism they want praising.

Indeed, they want all the rights & none of the responsibilities of writing. Pure Fantitlement

She put it on the Internet. Everyone is her audience. She must accept that.

The idea we must respect the wankficcer & condemn mocking it risible, yes, Fantitlement. [...]

 Will no one think of the fanchildren manchildren?

After I challenged him on the ghastly terms he was using he responded:

Fantitlement is a thing. The perverse belief that you morally own something because you like it.

"wankficcer" admittedly I only just came up with now, but it does the job in reduced characters.

  (He also thinks I'm being hubristic, so either I'm in for a tragic fall at some point in the future due to my own pride, or he doesn't know what hubris means. We won't really know until the Ides of March). Smith finds real comfort in reducing Mildred Bobbin and anyone else who dares to write fanfiction to those nasty little terms of his (don't you just love his pride in them in that last quote?). After all, what would bullying be without the names and buzz-words it relies on? Whether it's wankficcer, fantitlement, spaz, mong, trainspotter, virgin, live-with-your-parents, anorak or Comic-Book-Guy-from-The-Simpsons, they provide such delicious reaffirmation: who the saaad people are and who they are not. Smith kicks down. He spends his days tweeting sycophancy to those higher up in the Doctor Who echelon than him, and sneers at fanfic writers because they're a level below him. Halliday quietly distanced herself (much as so many have done with Moran), asking me not to conflate their views, although offering no more of her own to date.

Moran has spent the past seven days  on her Twitter timeline neither apologising nor giving any acknowledgement of Mildred Bobbin's blogpost about her experience (away from Twitter, all we know is that she has contacted her privately.) However, she has spent it thanking people for telling her how much they're enjoying her book . She's also spent it tweeting about Chicken Tikka Pies and singing My Sharona. She's ignored tweets calling for her to apologise like this one sent by me. Any possibility this might be due to embarrassment is shot down by her speedy tweeting (just 20 minutes after it hit the web) of her annoyance at Brooke Magnanti after she wrote this reasonable, inoffensive piece suggesting that there was no need for Moran to mock fanfiction and no shame in writing it.  She's also promoting her latest product: her Times column and a sitcom pilot based on her childhood. Why apologise - or even mention the problem -  when you've got a deadline (as she was keen to remind us) and a show about to start (it's broadcast today.)

Now, we know it isn't Owen Jones's style to suggest a friend of his did something wrong, and Helen Lewis went for her usual "mumble mumble can understand why some were offended mumble mumble don't think it was really homophobic though mumble mumble" fence-sitting.  Lauren Laverne's response combined name-avoiding, non-committal gutlessness with a suggestion that fanfic writers were the problem   I'm dreading Zoe Williams's and Ben Goldacre's defence, and Graham Linehan's inevitable anti-fanfic-writer rampage. They all know fully well Moran fucked up, and that arguing that Mildred Bobbin deserved such humiliation or that her account of its effect upon her is not a dignified and upsetting one would be difficult, but even if they can't quite defend her as much as they normally prefer to, they're sure as hell not going to criticise her. But if middle-class media honchos with thousands of sycophants eager to help them fight their own battles can look out for their own, why can't the world of SF? We mustn't allow the lazy, barely literate, poisonous, misogynistic sneers of James Cooray Smith to speak for a whole subculture. As they point out themselves, Paul Cornell and Mags L Halliday started off their careers writing fanfiction, and so did many who have a stake in the Doctor Who universe. If they are really and truly going to let a Murdoch-sponsored bully ignore the distress she's caused to an individual with a fraction of her supporters and influence , and say nothing while she surfs her way out of it over wave after wave of  "awww, thank-yous",  quotes from Norm from Cheers, and all the other things you see if you stare directly into Caitlin Moran's timeline, then it appears that Doctor Who's representatives don't share the values of its hero. And if Caitlin Moran has any decency, she must publicly apologise for her treatment of Mildred Bobbin and acknowledge that she's read her blogpost. Some things are more important than deadlines.

 For feedback tweet me here: https://twitter.com/RichardHCooper

Steven and the Women: the Dubious Gender Politics of Steven Moffat's Doctor Who (or, How Steven Moffat Ruined Doctor Who 2: The Smell of Fear)

(my previous piece)

In the debate about whether Steven Moffat's writing is misogynistic, mistakes have been made on both sides. Moffat himself responded to a piece in The Guardian by Jane Clare Jones thus:

I think it’s one thing to criticise a programme and another thing to invent motives out of amateur psychology for the writer and then accuse him of having those feelings,[...] I think that was beyond the pale and strayed from criticism to a defamation act. I’m certainly not a sexist, a misogynist and it was wrong.

The misconception he's working on here is similar to that sometimes made by those that attack him: the idea that a writer whose use of female characters is problematic and a man who hates women are the same thing. Moffat pointing out he's a nice guy with a wife simply doesn't counter any criticism of sexism in his work, however much he thinks it does. Conversely, the temptation when talking about sexism in Moffat's scripts seems to be toward saying things like "God, he must really hate women." but whether he does or not doesn't make a difference: nice people are as likely to write scripts which endorse rather than challenge stereotypes as nasty people. Older Who fans (or at least those with extensive DVD collections) might recall the surviving episode of the much-loved Troughton story The Web of Fear opens with an anti-Semitic stereotype, a "covetous Jew" who foolishly refuses to relinquish his valuable Yeti ("I see: you vant to rob me! Nobody makes a fool of Julius Silverstein! Take him avay!"). He is then punished for this covetousness when the Yeti comes to life and kills him. The crucial point here is that writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln and script editor Derrick Sherwin may well have been - or still are in the case of the surviving latter two - delightful people with no anti-Semitic tendencies at all. We have no right to accuse them of anything as people based on this script, what we do have a right to point out is that they have inherited a socially and culturally constructed prejudice (as we all do) and failed to challenge, interrogate or subvert it (as we all should). If they had been asked about it after the broadcast and responded by pointing out that they weren't anti-Semitic, it wouldn't in any way work as a defence against the criticism that that scene enforces an anti-Semitic stereotype. It's also entirely possible to pass on unpleasant or bigoted tropes by mistake: The Unquiet Dead's plot, in which a bunch of war refugees trick the Doctor by taking advantage of his pity and then turn nasty once they've been granted asylum, was clearly intended by Mark Gatiss as "vintage-style" Doctor Who rather than an Enoch Powell-style warning, and it's obviously unlikely that the fact that the first Doctor Who story with an all black guest cast (Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS) portrays them as an unscrupulous bunch of thieves was out of a desire by Steve Thompson to insult black viewers. Both episodes are the result of writers failing to consider the implications of how things can turn out on screen. The idea that the author insisting that they don't have those prejudices can be used as a defence of the work is an aspect of the Intentional Fallacy: the belief that what the author says he meant is the final judgement on a text. The successes and failures of a text stand by themselves, they're not the author's any more, and Steven Moffat cannot shrug off criticism of his work by pointing out he's a nice guy.

The problem with Amy Pond isn't that she's constructed as a "sexy" character. The problem is that this supposed "sexiness" intrudes in the way reality is constructed around her. The only job she can get is as a kissogram girl, then, when things are going better, as a famous model (right down to a gruesome shot of her face on a perfume advert that could have come straight out of one of the Mary-Jane scenes in the Spider-Man movies). In her penultimate episode we find she now "writes travel articles for magazines." Remember Moffat's idea of "one of the most accomplished woman who ever lived" is an aristocrat (and therefore a parasite) like Madame de Pompadour. In the extraordinary two-part Comic Relief special Space/Time - surely the most masturbatory piece of Doctor Who ever broadcast - we hear that she only passed her driving test because she wore a short skirt, and then the combination of that same skirt and a glass floor causes Rory, working at the controls below, to crash the TARDIS. As a result, we end up with multiple Amy Ponds. Instantly, we have a gag about Rory hoping for a threesome, the revelation that Amy finds herself attractive, and its accompanying punchline that Rory finds this exciting. In the runup to its broadcast Moffat promised viewers in Doctor Who Magazine "there’s a moment with two Amy Ponds in it. If you’re a red-blooded male surely that’s enough! You’ve got Amy Pond flirting with herself." His tweet immediately after the special promised the viewers three Amy Ponds next time, but he evidently decided that was one piece of drooling fanfiction that could be left to the net.

John Nathan-Turner's "you're there for the dads" policy towards his actresses was certainly the least tolerable thing about his tenure, but in his case it extended only to the characters' wardrobes, and the tendency for monsters to desire Peri in one season. The characters still served as proxies for the younger viewers. It's difficult to see how Amy can do this in moments where she's asking the Doctor to "sort her out" in the bedroom scene at the end of Flesh and Stone, let alone how Jenny can do the same in the scene in The Crimson Horror where she strips off her coat to begin kung-fu and as the camera learingly pans along her leather catsuit in slow motion, Matt Smith does an erection gag with his sonic screwdriver, or how children could identify with Clara after the Doctor's extraordinarily misjudged line about her "tight skirt" at the end of Nightmare in Silver (which we'll come to later).

There is no aspect of Amy's character that is not defined by that male construction we call femininity. The five threats she faces are pregnancy, the abduction of her baby, the loss of either of the men she loves, infertility, and the idea that it's presumable that the man she loves will reject her for that infertility. Controlling these subplots are the same prejudices that lie behind soap operas - Am I still a woman if I can't have children anymore? Will the man I love reject me for it? Is it my fault? My Baby - don't let them take my baby! Even as children, Moffat's heroines are there to be entranced by the Doctor. The setup from The Girl in the Fireplace, recycled like so much else in The Eleventh Hour, is disturbing in the way it allows the Doctor to gain access to Young Amy/Young Reinette's imaginations - giving him considerable power over them - and then moves forward in time in one moment so that we can bring in the older sexy actress. By the time we reach the Doctor stalking Clara as a child from afar while he reads The Beano, things are getting distinctly creepy (the very first shot of Karen Gillan, coming soon after the Doctor's scenes with the younger Amy Pond sees the camera panning up her thighs to reveal her policewoman kissogram costume. There's a horrible sense here that we're about to hear Maurice Chevalier singing "thank heavens for little girls - they grow up in the most delightful way"  on the soundtrack).

Moffat's sense of what goes on in the head of a young woman and any ability with logical characterisation he may have had left take a nosedive in Let's Kill Hitler. Amy and Rory's baby has been kidnapped, but it's revealed that they've already known her all their life in the guise of their best friend Mels, who now regenerates into an adult, which Moffat genuinely seems to think resolves that particular "missing baby" cliffhanger. There's no point shouting "where's the baby - isn't someone going to try and rescue the baby?" at your TV screen as I did - Amy and Rory have let that go now, as have actors Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill (as I've said before, the fact that the version of Amy left alone for 36 years in The Girl Who Waited never mentions it makes a mockery of anyone still claiming this is a show with any sense of emotional consequences or human resonance. Did Gillan ever ask Moffat or his writers "what's my motivation here?")

Chillingly, Moffat sees no problem in describing the pre-Doctor Who work of Men Behaving Badly creator Simon Nye, who contributed a predictable dud of an episode to series 5, as "beautifully observed" on Doctor Who Confidential. Nye's clearly a huge influence on him and not just through the family connection (Moffat's mother-in-law was the producer on Nye's Men Behaving Badly). His sitcom Coupling often featured similar storylines to Men Behaving Badly, such as a "girlfriend finds out about boyfriend's porn collection" plot which climaxed in a horrific monologue from the central character on how all men are obsessed with naked women - "halfway out of the birth canal we're already enjoying the view", and an interminable monologue about how men need locks on the bathroom door and women don't because "we are men! Throughout history, we have always needed, in times of difficulty, to retreat to our caves. [...] The toilet for us is the last bastion, the final refuge, the last few last square feet of man space left to us [OK, you get the idea]". Both scenes are presented in the binary "she thinks/he thinks" style, starting with Sarah Alexander ridiculing this male nonsense, then moving to Jack Davenport's angry defence of what men need, then Alexander takes this on board and she and Davenport are reconciled, now that the inescapable difference between the genders has been affirmed. Friends is the other obvious influence here. What all three shows - along with the current manifestation of this kind of television, The Big Bang Theory - share is an assumption that men are from Mars (the planet where they leave the toilet seat up) and women are from Venus (the planet where they eat Ben and Jerry) and a conviction that this is all there is: this is what men and women are like and it's futile to pretend otherwise. The choice between Seinfeld and Friends is not just a choice between good and evil ("I love Friends, but I never got into Seinfeld" -  David Cameron) but a choice between comedy with a sense of its own ridiculousness and comedy that assumes This Is The Way The World is; between comedy that sees a whole universe of lunacy out there and comedy that sees nothing but two demographic groups to place on separate sofas for alternate scenes.

Elaborating on gender differences, Moffat once remarked on Twitter:

 I AM sexist: women are cleverer, nicer, kinder and better at stuff. Don't let on or they'll keep us in fields. FIELDS!!!

This is the "how is that racist - isn't it good to have rhythm?"' fallacy: the idea that gender-essentialism and stereotyping is less of a problem if it is benevolent. It's disastrous for a writer, as it leaves him incapable of writing human beings. Moffat-written or Moffat-commissioned scripts don't so much fail the Bechdel test (which proposes that at least two female characters should talk about something other than a man) as fail to show up at the exam room. Hide was a lowpoint here: Clara is left alone to suss out Emma the female guest character (it's the Doctor's job to suss out the male one) and after both women have grimaced over the "disgusting" whiskey and agreed to move to tea, she gets the conversation going with "so you and Professor Palmer - have you ever - y'know?" and after Clara asks why not - "you do know how he feels about you, don't you?" - Emma changes the subject to how Clara feels about the Doctor. A universe with Weeping Angels and Daleks may be easy enough to conjure up, but a universe in which women drink whiskey is beyond imagining for Moffat and his team.

Virginia Woolf foolishly called Conan Doyle's Watson "a sack filled with straw" (and she didn't have the excuse of having seen Martin Freeman). It's merciful she was never introduced to River Song, the most misjudged and cynically constructed fictional character in history (well, at least until Clara came along). The only aspects of her not defined by a male scriptwriter's standbys of femininity are the signs round her neck that read "Spoilers!" and "watch the finale because something more exciting will happen there", usually replaced in the finale with "next series, all will be revealed." She's got poisonous lipstick, her all-time fantasy is a threesome with two Doctors, her last words before regenerating are "I'm concentrating on a dress size" , she promises that she's "a screamer - now there is a spoiler for you!" and her reaction to meeting the Doctor for the first time (from her point of view) is "you never said he was hot!" The "bickering" between the Doctor and River is excruciating because it's little more than the stage directions "they bicker" and "they flirt". One yearns for some genuine tension: what if River had a an unpleasant manner about her, or a manner that riled the Doctor in a way that unnerved the viewer, changing the status quo from "Doctor and his friends" and adding tension by making the dynamic less cozy? Sexual tension is rendered impossible by the Doctor's celibacy. Instead, their conversations are indistinguishable from Moffat, Smith and Kingston delivering their oral press releases for it on Doctor Who Confidential. River delivers cute domestic soundbites - "Hello sweetie", "I'm going shopping", "it's called marriage, honey." "You wouldn't answer your phone" - while the Doctor performs anaemic comedy "grrr! That woman will be the death of me" responses (Curiously, The Name of the Doctor spared us the gruesome River line promised in Doctor Who Magazine's preview - "Oh, I do like to watch a man think: it’s like watching a whale knit" - a line recycled from Coupling). Her revelation that the TARDIS only makes that noise because "YOU leave the brakes on"' is really just an upscale equivalent of the moment in Batman and Robin when Batman produces a credit card with a Batman logo on it, or Batman Forever's line "it's the car, right? Chicks love the car", all three showing the same contempt for the narrative, and provoking a jaded laugh that doesn't survive a second viewing. It's sadly not the only resemblance between Steven Moffat's Doctor Who and Joel Schumacher's Batman movies, the only question being whether the former is headed for the same notoriety. "Well, she is a woman," says the Doctor when Amy and Rory puzzle over her murderous behaviour. River's other two ways of speaking are to spout trailerspeak - "this will be the Doctor's darkest hour -  he'll raise higher than ever before and fall so much further" "you're going to find out very soon, now, Doctor, and I'm sorry, but that's when everything changes" - and hymns to the Doctor's near-Godliness: "You've decided that the universe is better off without you, but the universe doesn't agree", "To the people of the Gamma Forests, the word Doctor means mighty warrior. How far you've come. [...] And all this, my love, in fear of you".

 This isn't a character, but a soulless collection of gender and TV reference points, and the increasing lack of conviction in Kingston's performance - every smiling expression over-played to the point of simpering, every line over-enunciated in such a fey tone it becomes hard to hear her, and the strangely weak pitch in her delivery whenever she has to be frightened, tough or upset, as if she can't make the shift to proper acting (Eve Myles syndrome, as it's known), makes River as unsuccessful an attempt by a male writer to evoke someone from the opposite sex as anything by Benny Hill.

The Day of the Moon saw River Song betray the show's very ethos. Gareth Roberts, back in the days before he wrote for this version of the series, quite rightly said that the problem with the New Adventures version of Ace is that he instinctively felt the Doctor wouldn't invite anyone with a gun on board the TARDIS. How much more apposite this is when applied to River Song. Another Who writer who offered interesting opinions on this show in the 1990s, Paul Cornell, rightly observed that mid-80s Doctor Who, with Eric Saward as script editor, relied far too much on characters with guns, but even the truly wretched Saward never suggested that Lytton was cool and rather fun, or that Orcini would be fit to travel in the TARDIS. Compare the scenes of Lytton's bogus policemen shooting fleeing prisoners dead in Resurrection of the Daleks with River shooting the Silents in Day of the Moon. One portrays a shooting as cruel, frightening and psychotic, while the latter presents it as cool and sexy, right down to the moment when River does a Western/Robocop style twirl with her gun as she holsters it. The days of risking your life to stop the Brigadier from blowing up the Silurians and agonising other whether one has the right to blow up the Dalek incubation room have never seemed so far away.

Consider the soul crushing dialogue from that scene, a curious mixture of the witless and the pernicious:

Doctor: This is my friend River. Nice hair, clever, has own gun, and unlike me she really doesn't mind shooting people. I shouldn't like that, kinda do a bit.

River: Thank you sweetie

Doctor: I know you're team players and everything but she'll definitely kill the first three of you

River: (pressing her back against the doctor's while pointing her gun) oh, the first seven, easily.

Doctor: Seven, really?

River: Oh, eight for you, honey.

Doctor: (grinning) Stop it...

River: (grinning, attempting a "breathily sexy" tone) Make me...

Doctor: (giggling, sounding aroused) maybe I will...

Amy: Is this important flirting? [...]

Doctor Sorry. As I was saying, my naughty friend is going to kill the first three of you to attack...

[...]

(the Doctor and River are back to back, as River opens fire

River: what are you doing?

The Doctor: Helping!

River: You've got a screwdriver, go and build a cabinet!

The Doctor: That's really rude!

River: Shut up and drive!

(Doctor dashes into the TARDIS. River kills all the Silents, twirling and shooting in slow motion to heroic music)

It ends with a return to domestic sitcom talk, after River performs the gun-twirl: "my old fella didn't see that, did he? He gets ever so cross." Unlike with Ace, we're not being encouraged to think there's something wrong with this person: it's the show itself that comes across as jaded and withdrawn from empathy and decency to a psychopathic extent (and what a charming ethical copout to have the Doctor leave before he can witness the rest of the killing). Again, we have the depressingly widespread idea that a woman acting violently is empowering and a corrective to sexism and misogyny. When questioned about his ability with female characters during a Guardian interview Moffat replied:

River Song? Amy Pond? Hardly weak women. It's the exact opposite. You could accuse me of having a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people. That would be fair.

It would indeed. Unfortunately, a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people is no substitute for an interest in human beings.

For an example of how to write a sexy female character, look at Anne Hathaway's wonderful new version of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises. The narrative surrounding her - her hopes for the "clean slate" McGuffin, her fear of Bane, her redeeming compassion towards others in her territory - have nothing to do with her sexuality or her gender. That's why she's credible rather than camp when fighting bad guys, and why her love interest with Bruce has some emotional punch.

Clara, amazingly, is a new low. In my previous piece, I argued that Moffat was a cynic rather than an incompetent, and feared that we may be stuck with his version of Doctor Who for a very long time. Instead, there has been a slight nudge from cynicism towards incompetence. The individual scripts seem more in need of rewrites than the previous two seasons (which couldn't have been helped by any rewrites). The contrast between Neil Gaiman's episode for the last season, The Doctor's Wife, which irksomely but accurately deduced the kind of story that makes fans go "awwww" and "now THAT's what Doctor Who should be doing", and Nightmare in Silver, which began by making audiences go "WHAT ARE THOSE ANNOYING KIDS DOING THERE?" and ended by leaving them saying "WHAT did he just say about Clara's tight skirt? That's a bit off..." (and in-between, making them wonder what had happened to one of the episode's two guest stars, as the director has no idea how to convey the sense that someone has just been shot dead) being a case in point. The season's arc, similarly, is just as idiotic as the River Song/Melody Pond rubbish, but more likely to rub mass audiences and fanbases up the wrong way (a problem when this show is certainly no longer made for any one else). While River Song accurately capitalised on the kind of "what will happen at the end of Lost / will Bella and Edward end up together?" casual SF viewer (a new demographic, incidentally, strikingly different from the narrower "cult TV/SF fan" niche audience that shows from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Babylon 5 right up to Smallville aimed at: out of the frying pan into the other frying pan, it seems), this season's River Mark 2 is a much odder construction more likely to alienate its audience. Moffat assumes that revealing three versions of the same character in separate timezones is enough to get an arc going, but as he forgets to have the arc affect the Doctor by causing jeopardy (as even the inept "crack-in-time" and "who-is-River?" arcs of the previous two series did), and overlooks the fact that by Doctor Who standards three people who look and sound the same and use the same phrase at one point is not that exciting (compare with the Doctor casually noticing the resemblance between the two Gwens in Journey's End), the Doctor comes across as a stalker. "She's not POSSIBLE!" is a perfect example of telling rather than showing. Having the two earlier versions of Clara killed off means the character is reset twice, and then when the Doctor finally tells her about the other Claras, a literal reset button is pressed in Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.

Things reach their nadir in the Doctor's inexplicable line "A mystery wrapped in an enigma squeezed into a skirt that's just a little bit too tight"' at the end of Nightmare in Silver, a line which Gaiman himself seemed keen to reveal he probably hadn't written shortly after broadcast. Clara is now stalked in all senses: by a production team keen to exploit the attractiveness of the actress that plays her, by a writing team more interested in using her as a lure to get the ratings going for the next episode - why create a character for her when you can keep a "who is she?" arc going - and by a Doctor who's never been more poorly defined, tracking her for no reason other than morbid curiosity and who doesn't respect her enough to tell her the truth: like her creator and consequently the audience, he doesn't see her as a person but as an arc in flesh, and even he of all people seems keen to point out how shapely that flesh is.

With his third series Moffat has delivered something just as soulless, but with enough creaks to suggest a more limited shelf-life. Who'd have thought we'd ever get a Doctor who carries out executions (Dinosaurs on a Spaceship), commits genocide without considering "giving them a chance" as the Tennant Doctor would (Nightmare in Silver) or trapping three salvage-men inside his ship and threatening to blow them up if they don't risk their lives helping him find his friend (Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS), or that the 50th Anniversary would be celebrated by a special featuring only one of the past Doctors ("you don't want to turn it into too much of a fanfest," says Moffat, the man who's just given us a season with a Dalek story, a Cybermen story, an Ice Warrior story, a Weeping Angels story and three Great Intelligence stories). As we reach the point where the Doctor leers at a non-existent character, reducing her to an arc in a tight skirt, there seems to be a sense that Doctor Who is now not merely stupid but quite unpleasant (how long before those like Paul Cornell have the guts to speak about this, rather than posting "whew - wasn't that great?" tweets. I'm sure he could make some kind of argument that Moffat isn't misogynistic or sexist other than "he's my mate and you're not", but let's hear it. Cue sound of blogger throwing down a gauntlet). So as we await the point at which the writers of Doctor Who have so little understanding of female characters that we end up with an episode in which a lonely Amy and Clara order a pizza and the Doctor delivers it, and they ask him if he can can fix something for them with that big sonic screwdriver of his....Happy 50th anniversary, everyone.

(for feedback  @richardhcooper )

Hey Fandom: Any Room For An Opinion?

Regular readers of this blog, particularly its more mature pieces - will have noticed I'm in the tricky but interesting position of trying to bring the language of criticism - heartfelt, individualistic, provocative, unashamed - into the world of fandom, which tends towards the conformist - (did everyone else dislike it?) - the tentative - (of course that's just my opinion) - the anti-intellectual (you're taking it too seriously, how pretentious to use such big words, what are you on about?) the accusatory (you're just jealous, you're just trying to demonstrate your own superiority) the insulting (don't be obnoxious, don't troll, get a life, he's mad, what a strange man) the abbreviated (LOL, TL: DR, IMHO) and the labelling (Hah! Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons! Trainspotter! Geek!)

One of the creepiest trends on both twitter and forums  is the trembling, "don't hit me" use of "IMHO" in an opinion. Why do it? Of course it's your opinion: what else could it be? The only way "that's just your opinion" would work as a riposte to anything on this blog would be if I'd claimed to be able to produce figures backed up by The Lancet. Yet so many are nervous of upsetting someone who liked that show, book or film, they're deliberately removing authority and even conviction from their tone.

This is partly because criticism exists in a separate world from fandom, and perhaps a truce of some kind needs to be called. If you enjoy watching something and only want to share that enjoyment, then understandably you might see any less than adulatory opinion as pissing on your parade. Conversely, though, if you want to be left alone with other positive-minded fans, surely you can leave those of us who are enjoying debating an interesting point alone too rather than coming over to shout "WELL I LIKED IT!" There's room enough for both types, and no need for one to antagonise the other.

What's more worrying is seeing this panicky response to criticism spreading amongst writers themselves. Paul Cornell has written superbly about fandom foibles - this piece on canon and this one about fandom's relationship with drama are essential reads - but this curious conversation about Doctor Who Confidential on the comments section of his blog  provides a typical example of the brief glimpse of humourless, feudalistic threat displayed when one of the readers/viewers, without being rude or offensive, speaks out of turn:

Rob:
Sourpuss comment coming, for which I apologise in advance: The "family feel" of DW:C is no doubt wonderful to be part of, but it's the single biggest contributing factor to my no longer watching the show. The whole thing is so cliquey and self-congratulatory that it often seems as if an in-house lark has been broadcast by mistake. 'Ave a word, there's a love...

Paul:
Rob, how many Making Ofs do you know that are scathing attacks on their subject matter? They like what they do! And they transmit that to the viewers, and the whole makes a jolly celebration.

A third poster, SK, had a terrific reply to this:

Some 'making ofs' are actually watchable, interesting pieces which show how various effects (special or otherwise) were achieved, and what the people behind the scenes were aiming at (which is especially interesting if it didn't quite come off, and they realise that it didn't quite come off).

Not all of them are as cloying and indulgent.

A debate like this is surely everything a comments page is for: neither Rob nor SK have been rude: all they've done is criticise a TV programme. But this was Paul's reply:

Excuse me, SK, I rather harumph at your tone, especially at this time of the year, and especially because the people concerned were mentioned here only because they were kind enough to send me a gift. They don't deserve to come here and see that. Which is not to say I don't think you should be free to say it, just not in my gracious abode. Now, have some mulled wine.

And that's it. Discussion quashed. The mulled wine reference doesn't quite disguise the flash of warning: "careful old chap, don't care for your tone." The thing about "jolly celebrations" is that those in a different mood need to be cast out.

It's significant that this conversation should have revolved around Doctor Who Confidential, as that show was a good example of the Pollyannaism and enforced jollity that has taken hold of Doctor Who since 2005. SK's point is strong: compare DWC to the featurettes you would find on, say, the DVD of a Christopher Nolan Batman film. They assume their audience wants to know interesting details, and have enough respect for them to reward that curiosity rather than endlessly praising their own work. Peter Jackson, Christopher Nolan and the team behind Seinfeld realise that there's more you can give the audience than a "jolly celebration."

The world of Doctor Who, of course, didn't always use to be like this. In the 1990s, when new content consisted of  novels and fan-produced videos rather than a lavish Caitlin Moran-approved BBC One series, there was a greater belief in the importance of refusing to pull punches in your criticism. Doctor Who Magazine's reviewers at the time - Craig Hinton, David Owen, Vanessa Bishop - were searingly honest if they disliked a novel, video, factual book or documentary, even though this would sometimes cause tension if the author was offended.

 In the same decade, Red Dwarf Smegazine once had a feature called "The Great Red Dwarf debate", in which Steve Lyons and Joe Nazzaro debated whether the show had gone downhill or hit its stride with series 3. Lyons argued that what had made the earlier series work had been lost. Now, I don't agree with Lyons's view- for me Red Dwarf matured from 3 onwards - but I find it interesting: it's the kind of discussion I want to read and enter into. Can you imagine Doctor Who Magazine running a similar debate today? They've run one about whether the brightly coloured Daleks are better than the old ones: that's as controversial as it gets. Turning to the most recent DWM, I notice the latest "debate" is about what is better: horror in Doctor Who or science fiction in Doctor Who? It's interesting, too, that while the stronger reviewers like Vanessa Bishop, David Owen and Gary Gillatt all continue to review releases related to the old Doctor Who  (to the same critical standard as before), the DVD release of series 5 was reviewed by Toby Hadoke of "Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf" fame, while their most prominent reviewer of new episodes is the remorseless Graham "I loved it" Kibble White.

The example I used in an earlier blogpost for the tendency to stomp on any interesting opinion in order to create a sense of critical agreement and unity was Steven Moffat's response to hallor on twitter. To recap, this was the conversation (Moffat had just referred to River Song as bisexual)

Hallor:
appreciate the thought but I don't understand how River works for bisexual visibility when people need to be told she is bi

Moffat:
?????

Hallor:
If people need to be told she's bisexual, she's clearly not contributing to bisexual visibility. How is this hard to grasp?

Moffat:
When did I say I thought I was contributing to bisexual visibility?? Please stop being rude to me, you have no reason to be.

Hallor:
I'm just questioning your portrayal of a character you claim to
Be bisexual. How is that rude? I thought this was a discussion.

Moffat:
How is your rudeness hard to grasp?

Hallor:
I've been nothing but polite. Disagreeing with your opinion on something does not automatically mean I'm being rude.

Tom Spilsbury [editor of DWM]:
The comment that was rude was the 'hard to grasp' one. I know, because I get strangers who talk to me like this too. It is rude.



Good though the response to my blogpost on twitter feudalism was, it's depressing how many people took the view that Hallor's tweets were rude. I still can't see the point of responding to a coherent and civil question with five question marks, nor can I understand how five question marks could denote anything other than a failure to grasp something - what else are question marks for?

Anyway, Steven Moffat deleted his Twitter account in September, which his wife says is due to work commitments, but which Graham Linehan and Ian Levine saw as evidence that the "trolls" had won, and which script editor Andrew Ellard claims was preceded by a series of tweets of Dickensian pathos asking how he could reduce his more negative "@s". (See September 2013 update below this piece)  Those mean, mean fans. Don't they know what it's like to work in the media? Don't they release the damage opinions can do? Hard to grasp: what a cheek. Feel free to say their episode made you cry and that Matt Smith is fantastic and that you hope the Cybermen are coming back, but asking about River Song's contribution to bisexual visibility in the media: that's just out of order. It's sad for those of us who find the latter kind of discussion more interesting.

It's interesting to compare this conversation with a piece of correspondence published in DWM in May 1994, in which a reader from California named Sarah Keller wrote in to protest against the late Craig Hinton's review of Paul Cornell's Doctor Who novel No Future. Here's some extracts:

With all due disrespect to Mr Hinton, I ask that this whining overgrown schoolboy be fired and forced to grow up for a few years before thinking he is equipped to review books.
[...] Another example of Craigie's 'wit' being unleashed is his attack on Paul Cornell's gay characters in Love and War. I felt they were portrayed as people. Interesting people with problems. Which means that they can be "deeply unhappy" and unfortunately die of AIDS! It happens in life. Maybe not in Hinton's worldview, but as I've said, he needs a strong dose of reality. Certainly, honey, gays can be well-balanced and just happen to be gay, but some also dare to have human problems.
[...] This foolish little git is becoming more than I can tolerate. Please, please, please put a nuzzle on his rabid snout and kick him out into reality. He is disgusting.

Here's some extracts from Craig Hinton's reply:

Sarah - you seem to have misinterpreted my criticism of Ace and Benny in Paul's book. I was referring to the complete lack of character development since Love and War.
[...] in the Sixties, the Lord Chamberlain's office in Britain decreed that the only homosexuals permissible on stage and screen had to be "deeply unhappy", tragic people, whose nature meant they were flawed human beings. My comments expressed my disappointment that it's taken a long time for the opposite view to be seen in the series.
[...] Please don't presume that my "world-view" excludes people who have died of AIDS - I only wish this weren't true.

Sarah Keller's letter, like Hallor's tweet, brings up interesting issues. Unlike that tweet, it actually is rude, using wildly abusive language, implying that Craig Hinton was homophobic and wrongly assuming he wasn't gay. What's fascinating is that it doesn't occur to Hinton not to respond politely and intelligently: his reply is admirable and quite moving. The comment made by the editor at the time before he hands over the discussion to Hinton is noteworthy too: not only does he also decline to reciprocate Sarah Keller's rudeness, but his remark that "the 'who's your favourite doctor?' discussions of my youth are now stating to seem like a long time ago"' is actually used as a joke, a rueful acknowledgement that the time has come away to put away childish things. Nowadays it's not at all a joke, it's DWM editorial policy. Keller's letter would not have been published, and the current editor would have blocked her on twitter.

Paul Cornell has praised both the review and the letter in recent years when someone posted it on a forum. A quick look at the posts he used to make on the Doctor Who newsgroup rec-arts-drwho reveals a Doctor Who fan unafraid to challenge dreary received wisdom, frequently using the admirable maxim "dissent is good" (one I'm sorry he used first, as I can't use it for this blog), and raising the valuable point that Doctor Who itself is about someone who loves new ideas (a point he also makes well in the more recent canon piece, and which Lawrence Miles has made about Ian Levine, observing that no-one would detest Levine's closed mind and contempt for opinions different to his own more than the hero of the TV series he has dedicated his life to).

Similarly, Gareth Roberts, another writer for the modern series, wrote a sharp piece in DWM in July 2003 - two years before the show's resurrection. He rightly asks: "if you were coming to Doctor Who for the first time with Trial [of a Timelord], what on Earth would you think the series was about?" and writes of Silver Nemesis "I have no idea what Lady Peinforte, or Herr De Flores, or the Cyberleader want. What does the Nemesis do? The Doctor and Ace are so odd that's almost as hard to figure them out." Isn't this equally true of the recent series, which features as its heroes a girl whose baby has been stolen from her but who doesn't care about that too much, a woman who happens to be that baby grown up into a regenerating, time-travelling, gun-toting archaeologist, the girl's husband, who died and spent centuries watching over her as a plastic android replica, but is back to normal now, and a Doctor that all three have seen gunned down? Given the dream-like opportunity of writing for a wildly successful TV version of the show, a generation of intelligent critics like Cornell and Roberts have blunted their fangs as far as Doctor Who is concerned.

The presence of  writers on Twitter and logging on to forums, leading to them accidentally ingesting criticism, is a complicating factor. It's significant that Paul Cornell's objections to speaking ill of Doctor Who Confidential centred around the possibilities of those that worked on it seeing the comments. The antipathy towards fans Answering Back doesn't stop at twitter "@" etiquette, though. It's fair enough to say that it's unreasonable to send mean tweets on a show directly to its writer (mean being crucial here: not "I appreciate the thought but don't understand how River works for bisexual visibility" or wondering if someone who used 5 question marks is finding what you said "hard to grasp", and the same goes for "didn’t enjoy episode three, but episode two was surely best of the series! Love your shows, and IT I can really relate to, thanks!" which resulted in a lesson in etiquette from Graham Linehan detailed here. With forums, however, the comments are not addressed to the author. Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook's shocking book A Writer's Tale, which unintentionally explains so much of what went wrong with Doctor Who from 2006 onwards, contains an enlightening section where Davies reveals that writer Helen Raynor logged on to Outpost Gallifrey and read what fans had said about her Dalek story. Davies relates that, according to her, the experience was like being ganged up on and threatened by a group of bullying men. He reveals that he had to spend a large amount of time on the phone persuading her that they did indeed need her services. Now, if people had been sending Helen Raynor unpleasant remarks about her work directly to her, or making them to her face, I would agree with Davies's point, but to chastise someone for criticising a TV programme on a public forum because of the possibility of the author choosing to log on and read it is a preposterous as eavesdropping and then saying "How Dare you?" Sending strangers harsh criticism of their work uninvited is unpleasant and pointless but to say that you shouldn't make those criticisms anywhere on the Internet in case the author finds the site is a step too far. None of this is to say that a lot of nonsense isn't uttered on forums, of course, only that those that utter it are not "trolls", as Graham Linehan or Ian Levine would brand them. Trolls abuse people, not episodes of TV shows.

Another Doctor Who writer, James Moran, responded to one of Graham Linehan's anti-forum rants with this telling tweet:

You'd think comedy forums would be funny, wouldn't you? Read one once that was slagging off a mate. Yikes.

Every writer someone criticises is someone's mate and yet the very idea of criticising someone's mate has now become such a palpable fear, it's seen as a damaging enough case to end the tweet there, as forcefully as if Moran had said "can you believe they even drowned a little puppy?"

After the ferocious Graham Kibble-White had unleashed his nervously-awaited critical take on Victory of Daleks (he really liked it) someone asked his editor Tom Spilsbury on Gallifrey Base what he would do if Graham the Jackal loathed an episode. His response was that he couldn't see how he could employ anyone that mad. One thinks here of the response to Lawrence Miles's provocative - and in my view, spot on - argument on his blog that The Unquiet Dead endorsed anti-asylum seeker xenophobia in DWM's Fact of Fiction on that story. The piece summarised Miles's argument, and then simply expressed gratitude that most fans "knew when to stop reading things into" Doctor Who. That was it: no counterargument, no defence of the episode, no refutation of Miles's argument. The cry of fandom: stop reading things into it: we're not going to tell you why we dislike or disagree with your reading of it, nor offer a contrasting reading of our own: we just want you to stop reading. The dreariest conversation I ever had was with a fan who used to tell me I was "overanalysing" whenever I ventured a less than positive opinion about Doctor Who. He subsequently shortened this to just that word with an exclamation mark, which he fell back on whoever I said anything he disagreed with. This is a dangerous fallacy. You can't over-analyse anything or read too much into anything: you can analyse something poorly (in the other person's opinion), you can read or interpret something poorly (in the other person's opinion) but you cannot think too much. If every decoding is anther encoding, then every disagreement should be another opinion: what's chilling about fan language is that it attempts to bring the debate to a halt: arguments are met by insults and denials, but not counter-arguments or defences of whatever was criticised.

When I wrote my piece on The Thick Of It, an obvious aim was to stir debate: no decent writer only writes pieces he or she knows everyone will agree with. On Twitter I had some pleasing debates with admirers of The Thick of It, exchanging contrasting ideas while remaining friends. The comments section of the blog, curiously, was a different story, attracting insults only a few days after the blogpost went up (unlike the pieces on Moffat's Doctor Who and Graham Linehan, which still haven't attracted anything offensive). What was most telling about the first comment, written in a tone of humourless anger throughout, was what it didn't say: there was no defence of The Thick Of It, nor was there any actual rebuttal of any aspect of my argument: instead the piece focused on my stupidity for having written such a disrespectful article in the first place. There was a lot of insults: the piece was "rubbish", it was "egotistical" of me (I actually have to agree with Martin Amis here and say calling a writer egotistical is like calling a boxer aggressive: I'm not sure a meek, diffident essayist would be worth reading) to think that I could "deconstruct" The Thick of It, the piece was "not really criticism at all" but "an impotent attempt to assert your intellectual superiority." Again, note the denial: rather than countering the criticism, a very loud "NO!" is sounded: I don't need to disagree with you or because your opinion doesn't exist. I tried to make some of these points in my replying comment:

Hello angry anonymous comment-person.
Interesting that these panicky reactions to someone saying something critical about your favourite show apply as much to The Thick of It as they do to Doctor Who. (God knows what a Thick of It Forum would be like)

It's not egotistical to deconstruct Shakespeare, let alone The Thick of it. Is your strange idea of deference towards a tv show part of that tired old "when you make tv shows yourself then you can talk" argument, or do you think no-one has any business talking disrespectfully about tv? Would you prefer me to know my place? Are there no tv shows you feel superior too? How intimidating you must find switching on the tv if so. Don't you even feel superior to Jeremy Kyle? Piers Morgan? Frankly I'd rather have an egotistical critic than a diffident or meek one.

There's a slight contradiction between your annoyance at my less than polite tone towards a tv show and your own towards me: apparently it's fine to leave messages on someone's blog saying their piece is "rubbish" and that they are motivated purely by an "impotent attempt to assert you intellectual superiority" (and personally, I've no problem with you doing that) but bang out of order to mock a much-loved tv show on one's own blog. Have a look at The Thick of it on iplayer: there, see? It's still there, the nasty man's horrid little blog didn't hurt it.

The sheep-like attitude you would seem to
prefer to see in viewers and bloggers is depressing. No-one should be afraid to say they don't like something. It will have no effect on the programme/book/film (so if you're of a fan of it: why worry?); what it will do is encourage debate.

What's particularly striking is that you offer no counter-argument or defence of The Thick Of It: you focus entirely on how you hated the post.

The piece IS a criticism of The Thick of It: they exist, get over it. They're not going to cease to be criticisms and stand revealed as the work of "impotent" and "egotistical" fakes because you point at them and scream "that's not real!"

A second commentator named Melissa Naylor posted a brief reply telling me I "came across as obnoxious" and advising me to "work on your people skills". The debate - which could have been on The Thick Of It, comedy satire, fandom and politics - had now descended into insults (again, note the wide gulf between "work on your people skills" and "appreciate the point but don't understand how River works for bisexual visibility"). Rather than post testy replies on the dubiousness of holding forth to complete strangers about their "people skills", I deleted all three of our comments. This was a mistake, and in retrospect I should have kept a copy of the conversation to quote in full.

However, I offer two reasons for this uncharacteristic act. Firstly, if I wanted to swap insults I'd join a forum (although you can approach me on Twitter for that kind of thing). Secondly, I'd prefer to debate the pieces on Twitter rather than on the same blogpage, as my posting a defence immediately below the piece itself seems to me to dilute it: it should stand for itself, and follow-up comments I write within a day are inevitably going to be weaker than something I've spent time thinking over. Many blogs don't enable comments, and I've long wondered if it isn't self-defeating for an author of a long provocative essay to put shorter posts immediately below it, and both of the comments bear this out as the posters are clearly uncomfortable with things that are actually going to be a given in anything I write (of course the essays are going to be egotistical, of course they'll be unafraid to "deconstruct" anything and of course they're not going to worry about "people skills"). Leaving comments enabled makes this more like a forum with the essay as the first post, and that leads to other posters wondering why the first person posted such a long piece, and why they expressed an opinion with the assumption that it was true, with no IMHOs in sight. (If you don't like this piece,by the way, you can tweet me at @richardhcooper)

The same panicky, anti-intellectual tone can be found on some of my favourite responses to my "How Steven Moffat Ruined Doctor Who" blog, which were posted on a forum  (I quote from them in a spirit of interest, not spite, as these comments are not addressed to me, which makes them opinions, not insults):

This article is nothing more than a long-winded opinion made to sound authoritative and important. Some of us don't like the vapid, cheesy emotionalism of episodes like Love and Monsters and the whole of RTD's time and prefer arc-heavy, mystery laden shows. It's fine to have an opinion. He seems to be confusing "I don't like it" with "It's bad and has no value." I sure as hell disagreed with a lot of what RTD did at the helm, but I wouldn't accuse him of "ruining" the show.

If you look toward the comment section, it all makes sense. He basically tears Moffat apart using pseudo arguments, makes lite criticism of RTD to seem like he's bring fair and balanced, and adamant Moffat hates eat it up as though it were an intelligently well thought out article backing their own opinions. It's persuasion on the most basic level. Appear intelligent by saying things people won't necessarily understand, be assertive in your opinion, and sprinkle in exactly what people want to hear, in this case it's the opinion that Moffat is a horrible writer that has ruined Doctor Who.

After reading through this, I realized I'd read through it before. And Terror is right. It's a long winded way of saying that this person just plain hates Moffat Who. I had written up a list of things to refute points and such, but I just can't be bothered to. People are always bashing the current showrunner and saying tv has degenerated from intelligent material to flashy lights and bangs. I was about to type up more but I had to stop myself. I'm stopping. I remember the first time I read this, it actually convinced me of a few things and I started disliking Moffat. It's articles like these that now force me to require a good slap in the face every time I start to whine about some aspect of the show that is apparently not good. These rants are like commercials- they get in your head.

As others have said. It's too conflicting with itself, ignoring a lot of parts of Classic Who. And far too negative. Why the hell does he even watch this show? He seems like a bit of a negative sod overall too. Sure...it's an in-depth analysis...but it's an incredibly picky analysis.

What a sad title for a topic. I don't mind discussing these things here, but in the future, could you please link articles with titles like "An opinion piece on Moffat", etc.? I love visiting this place and I really dislike seeing sentences like these hovering halfway down the page every time I go here.

This is the kind of guy that irritates me the most. He thinks that just because he has a blog, and can write an essay length entry, that he is intelligent and knows what he is talking about.

Claiming that JNT was better than Moffat? The balls on this author.




It's fascinating, endearing and sad to see the lengths the commentators go to deny that they were impressed or saw any merit in the article, whilst describing the dangerous, seductive cleverness of its rhetoric. Exactly how could I "make" a long-winded opinion "sound authentic and important"? That would be quite a skill. The one thing that seems to be absent from these fans' world-view is the conceit that something can be entertaining, well-written, interesting or  enlightening even if one disagrees with it. They seem to soften momentarily, expressing interest in the way the piece is written, (do they not realise that "the balls on this author!" is precisely the kind of compliment an essayist dreams of ?) and then quickly back off.

The third comment is the most fascinating, revealing the palpable sense many fans have that a differing opinion poses a threat. The commentator sees my piece as a potential brainwasher. If anything, that's preposterously flattering to me. Raymond Chandler used to direct people to his bookcase when they asked if Hollywood had ruined his books. "There they are - they're fine." Couldn't someone tell fans the same thing? The distinction the first commentator makes between "I don't like it" and "it has no value" is false, and would only be valid if I had a tendency to wipe master-tapes, burn books and shout "what are you reading that rubbish for?"'at people reading Dan Brown on trains. Only a bigot would: I pose no threat to what you like, even if I happen to hate it.

It''s a familiar set of comments to anyone who's ever observed forum posters respond to a Lawrence Miles piece. Is he mad? What a saddo. Why talk about the show so much if he doesn't like it? Why's he use such clever words to sound clever? Why's it so long? Why's he so pretentious? What's he on about? The notes sounded most often here are a lack of interest in  anything you can't understand, and annoyance at opinions different from your own, neither of which are very Doctorish traits.

One of the most chilling moments I've had on the Internet came when I found out what TL:DR meant (if you don't know yet, google it. If you don't experience any revulsion you may be reading the wrong blog). It's the ultimate expression of the fear of different opinions, the fear of reading, the fear of controversy, reduced to an easily replicable slogan, which doesn't even bother to spell out its own words. The essay is a long form. The freedom it affords its author to develop their ideas comes from its assumption that the the reader can take or leave it. The piece isn't written for your convenience, so its length and the forthrightness of its opinions are not tailored accordingly. It's only aimed at readers who are prepared to consider another's viewpoint. If you can't be bothered to read the piece, is there much point in bothering to take issue with it?

The reaction to Christopher Priest's piece about the Clarke nominations saw the problem spreading wider still. Priest's blogpost was far from perfect, but it was an interesting and heartfelt piece that raised a number of good points. Damien G Walter's curious response piece put it down to jealousy - heaven forbid it might be an opinion:

So why then would a man held in rather high esteem by the community of Science Fiction writers and readers throw a hissy fit about the recently announced Clarke awards shortlist? The immediate assumption one might make is that Priest is somewhat vexed about his own novel The Islanders being overlooked for this year’s shortlist. And no doubt this is one of many straws piled upon this particular heehawing donkey’s back, but in this case probably not the most significant one. A more significant reason might be that Christopher Priest has spent most of his professional career not being J G Ballard. The two writers began their professional careers around the same period of the early to mid 1960′s, among a number of writers who would become known as the New Wave, all loosely connected by their shared agenda of making SF a serious and respected literary genre. Priest is not now among the first writers that come to mind in discussions of the New Wave…which is of course the point. [...] Christopher Priest has spent his entire career being close enough to the top table to smell the gravy, but has never quite been invited to sit down.  [...]And now, just when Priest might have expected to be acclaimed as an elder statesman of the genre, another wave of writers have taken the limelight instead. The bulk of the criticisms Priest lays at the feet of the current generation of SF writers including Charles Stross and China Mieville are products of his own swollen, bruised and delusional ego, but a few are true

Equally dispiriting was Pat Cadigan's open letter to the Guardian  in which she said she was "really disappointed to see The Guardian has picked up what is an extended tantrum by a disappointed writer and treated as if it should be taken seriously." Just what is the most depressing part of this? Is it the insistence that this must be down to jealousy - a complaint which essentially denies the existence of a criticism instead of refuting or countering it - or the idea, echoed by Cheryl Morgan in her response to Priest, that one thing that SF doesn't need is people taking it too seriously. Stay out of this, Guardian, no controversy here, nothing the outsiders need to know about: now let's get back to praising each other.

As Catherynne M Valente pointed out here: "saying 'he’s just jealous' as a way of discounting everything a person says does not become a critic." Adam Roberts, similarly, suggested that debates are what shortlists are for, not encumbrances to them. One might also recall the reaction to AS Byatt's excellent piece on Harry Potter, dismissed by Salon editor Charles Taylor   - as a "Goblet of Bile":

It’s clear that we’re dealing here with an acolyte at the temple of high culture barring the doors as the ignorant masses who love pop culture come a knockin’. Loath as I am to resurrect the old canard accusing writers or critics who dislike a popular work of art of being jealous, in Byatt’s case it might be true. Remember, this is the same writer who went into a highly publicized hissy fit some years back when Martin Amis was given a lucrative advance against future books. It’s only human for writers or filmmakers or musicians to feel resentful and even contemptuous when what they consider good, serious work is being passed over in favor of some pop artifact. But sooner or later, if you choose the life of a writer, you damn well better be able to make peace with the possibility that in all likelihood you will not enjoy spectacular commercial success. Byatt has it better than most, enjoying a modicum of fame, more than her share of respect, and the distinction of being one of the relative few who has been able to make a living at literary fiction. But success on the scale of J.K. Rowling’s clearly gets under her skin.

As with the reactions to Priest, the isn't a counter-argument but a very loud SHUT UP! Note also that Byatt's piece contains this:

- as they do not now review the great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences.

Perhaps Taylor has never head of Pratchett: a vastly superior writer to Rowling who attracts far more literary snobbery (and whose collected short stories features an introduction by Byatt as erudite and delightful a corrective to literary snobbery as anyone has ever written). Fay Weldon's comments were spot on:

Byatt does have a point in everything she says but at the same time she sounds like a bit of a spoilsport. She is being a party pooper but then the party pooper is often right.

This leads us to my favourite piece about this topic. It's a fine argument for the superiority of anger, contempt, indignation and conviction over mulled wine and forced jollity. How can one have an interesting opinion without negativity, any more than one could have one without positivity? When we get angry about things is often when we care the most, and frequently more things are achieved by people who have had enough than by Pollyannas. Of course "it was the worst thing in the history of television" and "you can't write" are bloody useless criticisms, but only because they're one-note, poorly expressed and, in the case of the latter, personally insulting. We need to judge critiques in terms of quality rather than negativity. As the great Adam Mars-Jones - perhaps the best critic working today - said recently, "the only bad review in my book is one whose writing is soggy, its formulas of praise or blame off the same stale shelf" (He also said "a book review is a conversation that excludes the author of the book. It addresses the potential reader", which is a valuable reason why "Amy Pond is one of the most unconvincing and poorly-crafted characters in TV history" is better blogged than tweeted to her creator, why calling the author of a blogpost "obnoxious" is better posted on a forum than the comments section of the actual blog itself, and why you should  never go on the offensive against someone for what they said about your work on a forum).

Tell me Bond films or Doctor Who are crap and I'll be bored. Tell me why you find them dreary, repugnant or troubling and I'll be interested, even if I don't agree. Tweet to me "Read your latest blogpost: God, you're so full of yourself" and I'll struggle to see what you'd expect in reply, tweet to me "your piece is riddled with holes: for instance..." or "that's a preposterous argument because..." and I'll be interested enough to debate with you.

The age of TL:DR and IMHO has left a generation frightened of opinions. Increasingly, the image for the future of interesting critical opinions on SF, fantasy and comedy looks like that of a boot stamping down on a human face, and whatever the owner of the boot might say, that doesn't look like Comic Book Guy's face to me. If it's "people skills" you want, maybe you should join a forum or find a meeker blog. There's no mulled wine here.

The Trouble with Geek Culture

If you haven't read this splendid piece by Patton Oswalt,
you really should, as it's the most interesting thing anyone's written on popular culture in years. Have a look, too, at these two pieces: http://www.edrants.com/review-the-green-hornet-2011/
http://sotcaa.org/comment/kidsprogramme.html

These three pieces focus on the same point: that the fans are becoming the creators. We can think of further examples: Kevin Smith puts a few lines of amusing dialogue about Superman in one of his screenplays, and is commissioned to write a Superman movie. Jonathan Ross's famous comic collection has recently made him a comics writer, and his wife Jane Goldman has gone from writing books on The X-Files to scripting superhero movies (she wrote Kickass, which is rightly demolished in the second of the pieces linked above). Mark Gatiss began by doing skits on his favourite horror movies in the comedy series The League of Gentlemen and indulging his love of Doctor Who in fan-produced videos and Who novels, but now he's a writer on Doctor Who itself, as well as BBC One's Sherlock and his own horror series - Crooked House - for BBC Four. A glance at the poster for Spielberg's multi-million dollar Tintin movie reveals Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish listed as screenwriters: the former began by doing cute little SF and movie pastiches when he directed the Channel 4 sitcom Spaced, while the latter would engagingly recreate movie scenes with toys on the late-night The Adam and Joe Show (the third credited writer on Tintin is one Steven Moffat, whose name rings a bell. Did I mention him on this blog?)

If the geeks (fans, nerds whatever we call ourselves) have take over, I don't think it's a cause for jubilation. Fans are consumers. They aren't necessarily creative talents. Sometimes they are, of course: Spielberg, Lucas and Tarantino are heroes in this regard (though, God knows, there are limits to those three talents), but their work delighted because of its freshness: for all the influences proudly put up there on the screen, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars and Pulp Fiction feel, from the start, like nothing else you've ever seen before. It's dangerous to start believing that you should be a filmmaker just because Tarantino too once worked In a video store, even though the chances that you could are increasing.

Just because you have an extensive knowledge of comic-books doesn't mean that you have extensive gifts for writing them. Alan Moore - one of the greatest writers in that medium, and probably the single greatest writer to do anything with superheroes - had little regard for comics except for the work of Will Eisner; his imagination was stimulated by Blake and Pynchon. Robert Holmes, the greatest of Doctor Who's writers, had little interest in the show before he started work on it: like Douglas Adams, he cheerfully set out to write what he felt would make good TV, not what he grew up with Doctor Who as.

I loved Mark Gatiss's A History of Horror on BBC 4: it was infectious and uncliched, and he adapted Wells's The First Men on the Moon pleasantly enough, but is he really the Nigel Kneale of his day? His three Lucifer Box novels and his work for Doctor Who all seem to be pure pastiche. The Who episode The Unquiet Dead was instantly proclaimed a modern classic, but isn't that because it uses all the ingredients we associate with classics? Victoriana, Christmas, snow, Dickens, gaslit romance, lavish special effects: enough to make Doctor Who Magazine's Reviewer, Rebecca Levene, declare that a generation now had their very own Talons of Weng-Chiang. Lawrence Miles probably put it best when he observed that Gatiss's Doctor Who novel Last of the Gadarene (which opens with a preface in which Gatiss remembers reading the novelisation of Planet of the Daleks when off sick from school while his mum brought him chicken soup) was acclaimed in reviews by numerous SF magazines for being "perfectly Pertwee", despite the fact that resembling an earlier work is by itself hardly a guarantee of quality (interestingly, the reviewer of Michael Moorcock's Doctor Who novel for Doctor Who Magazine, who found the book a bit difficult, commented on how much he'd rather read Last of the Gadarene). Miles points out that producer Barry Letts would never had commissioned something so banal (even though many of the stories of that period were much rougher around the edges than Gatiss's effort). Similarly, Unquiet Dead isn't half as good as Talons of Weng-Chiang (the story of the Iclelandic Alliance, the Peking Homunculus and the Butcher of Brisbane): it merely resembles a recollection of it. The Talons of Weng-Chiang was a lot more interesting than Victoriana.

More dubious, though, is Charlie Brooker's elevation to satirist. His Guardian columns are diverting, and his Newswipe/Screenwipe shows are informative, but when Channel 4 runs trailers announcing a series of satirical dramas from Charlie Brooker, one wonders exactly how such a thing came to be seen as an event (especially if you remember Nathan Barley, Brooker's unremarkable attempt at a sitcom, and his truly dreadful drama Dead Set for E4, which Brooker himself described as bit of nonsense about zombies but which gained a BAFTA nomination). It's not necessarily surprising that the first (I couldn't face the next two) of the Black Mirror trilogy, The National Anthem, was worthless: do any of Brooker's talents suggest he could depict human beings believably, or had a distinct satirical point to make? His fans think so, and so it got made.

The second piece I linked to mentions a more cynical motive for the ascension of geek culture: the idea that film producers, TV executives and franchise owners can use fans to test reactions to their products, and to convince their customers that the films, TV shows, games or comics are being made by one of them. Champion mentions Harry Knowles being flown to press junkets and the BoothBabes at ComicCon. I would add The Big Bang Theory as another example: a carefully marketed show made by people uninterested in SF, but smart enough to realise that fandom has become a lucrative target audience (note the presence of merchandise, the references to ComicCon, and the guest cameos from people all associated with well-known and still lucrative franchises: Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Terminator, Marvel).

As Oswalt's article mentions, in the age of YouTube there aren't really any niches for interesting bits of culture to hide in anymore. When Evil Dead 2 was just a cult film that the odd fan would try and persuade you was really, really hilarious, that was fine: you still didn't have to watch it. Nowadays its director, Sam Raimi, is given millions to make three Spider-Man movies, and his wretched ideas of characterisation, humour, plotting and depth are up there for all to see. George Romero's Dawn of the Dead was stimulating because of the low expectations in which one watched it: low budget, poor acting and reliance on zombies, the most deeply uninspired of all monsters. As the central characters barricade themselves in a shopping mall, and live a strangely utopian existence, and the zombies become pathetic rather than scary when a biker gang interrupt the paradise and start shooting them, at one point even pushing a custard pie into a zombie's face, the film becomes oddly affecting, and seems to play with our response to horror. Like funny videos on the Internet, this becomes less surprising and amusing when money and mainstream hype is poured into it. The witless plot of The National Anthem was taken from a few navel-gazing sentences in one of Charlie Brooker’s Guardian columns ten years previously, just as Nathan Barley was plucked from a description on a page of spoof TV listings. The best warning, though, of how something genuinely affecting in minature can be milked to death is provided by the offspring of Rob Brydon and Hugo Blick's excellent 10-minute Marion and Geoff monologues: a 50- minute special in which we had to see many of the things that had already been so brilliantly described, a second series, now of half-hour episodes, which was more self-consciously ‘dark’ and ‘sad’; and finally another full-length series that absurdly attempted to turn the character into a Mrs Merton/Dame Edna-esque spoof chat show host. Let’s hope no-one tries to turn the brilliant Downfall meme into a TV series. The magic would fade.

Another problem is that geek culture can often be quite conservative. The best episodes of Doctor Who are the ones that are nothing like Doctor Who, and these tend to alienate fans. To anyone interested in good writing, Love and Monsters is precisely the kind of innovative script that Doctor Who should be doing, but to fans it's abhorrent because it's got silly humour, a silly monster and Peter Kay in it (older Who fans will remember Doctor Who Magazine's poll of 1981 in which Kinda, one of the most extraordinary Doctor Who stories to date, came bottom, perhaps because it didn't have any Cybermen in it). If the fans become the writers, we might end up with films, books and TV shows written to strict genre guidelines (much the way Doctor Who is written now).

Oswalt's solution - killing off geek culture - is amusing but, as Champion suggests, not quite feasible. A better solution would be to improve the standard of criticism for popular culture: we need critics that can tell the difference between the quality of something and the genre tropes it wraps itself in, critics who can see Life of Mars as an empty Sweeney knock-off rather than mistaking its use of time-travel and nostalgic clips from old tv shows for cleverness or postmodernism, that Battlestar Galactica and The Dark Knight have nothing to say about Bush's America and that the Scream movies aren't any better than other dull slasher fodder just because every now and then someone says "this is just like we're a slasher movie." Why have standards of print TV criticism fallen so low that AA Gill and Caitlin Moran are somehow our most famous tv critics? Why do so many reviews of Bond films begin with the assumption that everyone hates them, unlike Paul Cornell's fabulous review of Casino Royale on his blog? Why must Lawrence Miles's blog be the only place we can find intelligent criticism and good writing on Doctor Who? Why were SOTCAA the only ones to see through Ricky Gervais?

The kind of criticism we need is not dissimilar to Clive James's concept of the "Metropolitan Critic", something we also find in the splendid writing of John Carey, using wit and personal response to texts to counter the stupidity of the academic approach to literature, but unashamedly erudite so that accusations of dumbing down won't wash. The Internet certainly seems to offer better criticism of popular culture - look at this excellent piece at The Quietus http://thequietus.com/articles/07434-ricky-gervais-mong-face on Life’s Too Short - but the web is so vast and democratic, it's difficult for it to make the same impact. These pieces need to be sought out so they can make ripples and provoke discourses. I'm not sure if geek culture needs to die, but it certainly needs to grow up.