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 )

Skyfall and me

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

This piece is mainly about Skyfall and to a very small extent about depression (under the surface, though). First, let's start off with how I felt when I first saw it. Bear in mind that the reason for the unfairly rantish tone to the section that follows is that I first saw the film with unreasonably high expectations. Skyfall has suffered a most peculiar fate for a Bond film: it's been overpraised. Bond films are not talked about intelligently, yet  previously the assumption from dull critics was that we all found them naff. One of the reasons I fell so hungrily on Paul Cornell's review of Casino Royale on his blog (it's linked to the right of the screen) was that it was precisely the kind of thing that no journalist was writing: it made no assumptions that we'd always hated the Bond films, and drew on previous films and books without assuming we hadn't read or seen them. In the age of Simon Winder's execrable yet favourably reviewed book The Man Who Saved Britain (which opens with the author rewatching Live and Let Die and finding it to be crap before going on to tell us what he nevertheless thinks these films and books tell us about Britain) and interminable professional pundits like Bidisha appearing on Radio 4 to tell us all why she didn't think there should be a 23rd Bond film, here was an actual critique of the film. The Sam Mendes-helmed Skyfall, though, everyone's decided to praise, and its faults have been unilaterally ignored. It's familiar to anyone who remembers the aura of holiness that everyone placed around Danny Boyle following his Olympics Opening  Ceremony. An example of the smugness of this "we all liked that, didn't we?" culture is a ghastly tweet from Lauren Laverne during the ceremony: "to anyone complaining about this, please fuck off forever."

So with that in mind, here's my original rather misanthropic take on Skyfall:

What's odd about this is how magnificent it would have been had it appeared in 2002 instead of Die Another Day. There, the Aston martin's reappearance, the "no gadgets any more" theme and the death of M would make perfect sense. This would have been a phenomenonal swansong for Pierce Brosnan

Instead, this stars an actor too young to have been active during the cold war, who's only played Bond twice before and who's playing a version that didn't become a double-O until after 9/11. He He was already sold to us as 21st-century Bond: in Casino Royale, he says "do I look like I give a damn?" when asked "shaken or stirred?" and the only gadget he was given was a defibrillator. The death of M and the Goldfinger modifications on the Aston Martin are odd given that M was rebooted in Casino Royale and the Aston was just a car Bond won off a thug in a card game.

Four years is not long enough to start from scratch if you've got the same actor in the lead: the amount of time that lapsed between The Dark Knight films was about the same, and yet imagine if tthe last one had featured references to the days of Robin, King Tut and Aunt Harriet.

GoldenEye proposed that Bond remain an anchronism in a modern world, Skyfall tries to get back to that concept, despite having created a modern Bond in Craig's previous 2 movies. The scene where Bond points out his gadgets are pretty meagre and Q replies they don't go in for exploding pens anymore isn't surprising or poignant because we've already had two gadget-less films, and this version of Bond has operated in a gadget-less world ever since he became a 00. It's as if Captain Picard had started reminiscing about the time he fought the Gorn.

However, this could have worked If the film had the balls to bring back some of the old chutzpah, to begin with Bourne-Bond and bring in classic Bond more and more as the film progresses. Instead we get the dull Ben Whishaw as Q, who patronises both Bond and the audience when he says "what were you expecting: an exploding pen? We don't really go in for that anymore" prompting me to say "yes, but wasn't it better when you did?" Is this grown-up storytelling, or an adolescent making a big thing of throwing his toys in the skip? (and I can't help remembering that the first of Bryan Singer's worthless X-Men films has the line "what were you expecting, yellow Spandex?": as if that film - and its boring black costumes - were something more interesting, less embarrassing, more substantial than that.

Then there's the fact that Bond contributes so little to the narrative. His first scene with Silva sees him fail to save Severine's life - and yet literally seconds later he does the very thing that would have done so, before revealing that he's already radioed for help. The London setpiece is similarly flat: he arrives at the enquiry, opens fire...and contributes nothing. Once he's shot the fire extinguisher, Silva gives up and leaves. And what was Mendes thinking of in the scene where Bond watches his quarry assemble a sniper's rifle, but lets him take out his unknown target before attacking him?

What's missing is verve: the opening scene tries so very hard to be Casino Royale, but Mendes is no Martin Campbell, and stupidly insisted on replacing David Arnold with his regular conposer Thomas Newman. Music matters: this scene would have been a lot more exciting had Arnold done the score.

Like the Aston Martin and the ill-judged Goldfinger homage in Fields' death in Quantum of Solace , the scene where Bond, an opponent and a gadget fall into a pit with a komodo dragon is clearly the director adding what he thinks is a "traditional" Bond moment, trying to recreate some half-remembered scene from his childhood viewing. Here Mendes is clearly thinking of Live and Let Die and its alligator farm scene, but if only Skyfall had more of that film's brio and invention (I can't imagine, either, that this scene of CGI Komodo dragons and no notable stuntwork will stick in children's imaginations the way the very real crocodiles and the splendidly dangerous stuntwork stuck in mine)

Then there's the emblems of stale humourlessness: the things that remind me I'm not watching a Bond film, as I was with GoldenEye. That fucking gunbarrel still at the end of the credits, instead of the beginning where it was dynamic and inspiring. Newman's score, bland credits again (a huge improvement on MK40's effort for Quantum, but Daniel Kleinman - returning after Casino Royale, for which he provided the most beautiful credits sequence ever created - seems to be on autopilot: his gunbarrel - assuming it's his - is no better than MK40's either - remember how good the ones he did for Casino Royale and the Brosnan films were? )

All three Craig films have attempted to shoehorn two Bond girls into a script that only needs one: here, at least Berenice Marlohe's performance is skillful, never grating as Caterina Munro's and Gemma Arterton's did, but the idea of the Doomed Woman whom Bond cannot save is getting creepily misogynist as well as tedious. With both her death and that of the victims in the train Silva sabotages, I couldn't help thinking: no-one in this film really cares, so do we? There's more emotion in the destruction of the aston martin. Doesn't the film have the same casual disregard for life as in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie?

On to the film's redeeming features: Daniel Craig getting to play a damaged James Bond, an idea that Die Another Day fudged; the skilful way the character of Eve is constructed; a decent supporting cast for once; the most exciting climax ever seen in a Bond film, a decent villain for once (although due more to the actor than the script) the pretty landscape shots, the mythic tones (Mallory, Tennyson, Churchill and best of all the gag about the model bulldog: a lovely mixture of deflating humour, poignancy and stirring iconography). The splendid moment when the series uses the word "fuck" for the first time. The film having the guts to suggest that Bond isn't fazed or offended by homoeroticism. Not enough. The film may have some pretty "remember the Bond films? What a shame he's a thing of the past" moments, but the entertainment is meagre and no more intellectually rewarding than before. Depriving Bond of gadgets and thrills doesn't make him Hamlet. We're depriving our children of magic.

A few weeks later, things got so bad I was making up alternative titles:

Desperate Need for a Script Doctor, No?

Crush a Fan's Dreams with Love

Never Say "I'm looking forward to the new Bond movie" Again

For Kim Newman's Tastes Only

That Draft Was Not Enough

I've calmed down a bit now. The Aston Martin complaint is trivial, and the comment about rebooting M is unfair, firstly because the three post-reboot films have allowed us to get to know the character enough for her death to be moving, and secondly because right from her first scene in Casino Royale, the writers have skilfully created a different character - tougher, courser, with more of a bullshit-detector -  than the one Dench played in the Brosnan films. This is one is actually closer to Fleming's M - perhaps even closer than Bernard Lee's was. The comments about the title sequence are unfair, too, as Kleinman has produced a fine piece of work even though it lacks the gorgeous colour and texture of Casino Royale's titles. The comments about Whishaw aren't entirely fair too; there's enough spark between him and Craig to suggest this could result in good things in the next film, and it was a step in the right direction to bring this away from the standard quippery of the John Cleese (who was clearly cast to try and recreate the Desmond Llewelyn style, like the similarly too-obvious choice of Stephen Fry as ersatz Q in Stormbreaker) model, and into more character based-comedy by making him younger and his disdain for Bond believable rather than part of a pantomime routine.

 But let's flash back to December 1995. I'm sitting in the cinema with my dad, waiting for the film I've been dreaming about -  GoldenEye  - to start. A terrific arrangement of the Bond theme accompanies a gorgeous new computer-generated version of Maurice Binder's Gunbarrel design by Daniel Kleinman. A splendid opening shot of a vast dam. A figure appears and there's magnificent bit of stuntwork as he attaches a bungee chord and leaps down the dam. Bond meets up with 006 (a slick introduction for the film's villain). The precredits sequence ends in equally spectacular fashion, as Bond drives a motorbike off a mountain in pursuit of a wayward plane. There's so much to list here.  Famke Jannsen as the ribcage-cracking Xenia Onatopp, knowing exactly the kind of full-bodied Camp her character needs to make her come to life, and pitching her performance perfectly. A marvellous introduction for Judi Dench as the new M, which begins with her calling Bond "a sexist mysoginist dinosaur, a relic of the cold war" and ends with her telling him to "come back alive."  The same flair for action that Campbell would later bring to Casino Royale, giving us a tank chase (a tank chase !) that's got everything: the Bond Girl barely concealing a "he's coming for me" smile, the Bad Guy guzzling from a hipflask and barking panicky instructions to his driver as the tank approaches, soldiers pirouetting though the air as their vehicles collide. The sheer, joyous, Christmasty, Bondness of it all. At the end of it my imagination was full of tank chases, tanks derailing trains, femme fatales with ribcage-cracking thighs, heroes bungee jumping down vast dams, exploding pens, fights atop giant satellite dishes, impeccably tailored heroes who grab machine guns, gun down countless Russian soldiers, remove their leather belts (which naturally doesn't result in their trousers coming down) and after a quick smile and a "trust me" to the Bond Girl, fire grappling hooks from them and then smash their way through a window without so much as ruining the line of their suit.

Compare the Q scenes: in 1995, we get the delightful Desmond Llewelyn in full-on Merlin mode. In fact, forget Merlin: he's Father Christmas. In 2012 we get Ben Whishaw in an Art Gallery. As Bond himself says, "Not exactly Christmas." And note just how well the exploding pen mocked by Whishaw's Q actually works in GoldenEye: it comes at a moment establishing that Natalya rather than Bond has turned the tables on the villans, and allows Bond to continue to advance the narrative (unlike the Bond of Skyfall) without diminishing Natalya's contribution. Minor baddie Boris has a nervous habit of clicking a pen three times: when he confuses Bond's pen for his own, Bond and the audience struggle to keep track of whether the pen is armed or disarmed.

In 2012 my inner child feels short-changed, despite Skyfall's considerable merits, and Brosnan is still my favourite Bond.

Skyfall is the slickest, cleverest example yet of the cultural trend that gave us Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, Quantum of Solace and the version of Doctor Who offered by the Death Comes to Time webcast and some of the New Adventures novels, just as Craig-Bond is a slicker version of Dalton Bond. It's a more entertaining take than those cited, a stronger take, and one that gets far more mileage out of the concept, but it's still leading to a dead end. The great critic Adam Mars-Jones put a name to this phenomenon when discussing the film of Watchmen on Newsnight Review "It's sordid escapism that I don't understand: I get sordid, I get escapism, I don't like them mixed." The original Watchmen, of course, rather spearheaded this dubious movement along with Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, but no-one understood - and continues to understand - this better than Moore himself, who delivered this magnificent rant against the Legacy six years after its publication (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJqLVsPD7Js 6;40 mark)

I think that I'd have to echo what David Bowie said about his influence: this is the face that launched a thousand pretensions. At the time I hoped that Watchmen might show up a lot of the essential silliness and redundancy of the superhero genre. It wasn't meant as a revitalisation of the superhero, it was meant as a tombstone for the superhero, at least in my terms. I could 't see any point in doing superheros after Watchmen. Unfortunately, everyone else could, and there have been an awful lot of bad Watchmen clones. Not just specifically Watchmen ones: this would extend to Dark Knight [Returns] as well, people who were looking at those frankly grim and postmodern superhero comics of the mid-80s, and instead of moving on from there, have just recycled them again and again and again for the last six years. It's almost like postmodernism by numbers: you make a few references to William Burroughs, you make a few references to some currently popular band like REM that will impress your young readers with how hip you are, you throw in some garbled sub-psychadelic philosophy, and you've got a Modern Comic. Doesn't matter whether it has any substance, doesn't matter whether it has any direction... but it hits enough of the right buttons so that people will recognise this as something modern and experimental and daring, and of course it is not in the least bit experimental or daring. To me the people who have taken chances are not in the mainstream. The people who have taken the chances are the people like Chester Brown, the Hernandez brothers, Peter Bagge, Julie Doucet, all of those people.  They are not getting big royalties for this summer's giant Batman crossover, but they are doing the work that is dangerous and radical and innovative. They're the ones who deserve the credit.

In Watchmen Moore, unlike Miller, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, David Goyer or Purves and Wade (and Moore himself in other projects) wrote about human beings. No disrespect to those writers, of course, (I enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises, Batman Begins and Casino Royale immensely, and don't get get me started on what Blade means to me) but they are dealing with mythic, iconic rather than psychologically layered characters, and their work is at its strongest when it embraces this. It didn't say much for the comic world that they tended to lump Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns together, (I'm reminded here of Lawrence Miles's observation that Doctor Who and Quatermass are opposites rather than kindred spirits as is often lazily assumed). What Frank Miller did in  Dark Knight Returns  and Batman Year One was exactly what he later did in Sin City (which no-one ever claims as anything other than pulp): he retold Mickey Spillane and Dirty Harry stories, but with a dash more verve, and a refreshing willingness to push towards the more grotesque aspects always present but only touched on in the world of Mike Hammer and Harry Callahan. To argue that this made Batman a more plausible figure and was a work of great intellectual significance - let alone that it is fit to stand alongside Watchmen, Maus and American Splendor - is as preposterous as claiming that Sin City can stand comparison with The Wire. There's an element of wishful thinking here: fans like to convince themselves that what they enjoy has social, political or philosophical depth. It's easier to convince yourself that your favourite superhero story has something to say about the Iraq War then actually go and read a selection of books and articles about the Iraq War; a cultural equivalent of finding out you can work from home. The modern Battlestar Galactica is the most abhorrent manifestation of this: a slackly paced, poorly acted farrago of cardboard characterisation, predictable dialogue, macho top Gun dogfights and right-wing moralising, all dressed up as something that cares about serious issues (let's not forget George Monbiot's praise of Avatar as a pro-environmentalist movie here, or the those who suggested that Bane's "Occupy Gotham" movement in The Dark Knight Rises was based on the Tea Party rather than, say, Occupy Wall Street.)

I can't help but think of a quote from Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts: "a failure of the imagination that would see Miss Marple as a player of chess on a thousand different boards, just because she always turns up when there's a murder." Roberts was talking about the 1988-89 seasons of Doctor Who, which were directly influenced by Alan Moore and Frank Miller's work at the time, with Script Editor Andrew Cartmel even telephoning Moore to ask him to write for the show. Roberts's summary isn't quite fair, especially as a description of the televised shows (some of the best Doctor Who stories - Ghost Light, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Remembrance of the Daleks, Survival, The Curse of Fenric - were made at this point ) but it's certainly true of what came after them. Virgin's New Adventures novels and  the Death Comes to Time  webcast built  on the ideas from the 88-89 seasons, and did indeed turn the Doctor into a much less interesting figure, who referred to himself as Time's Champion with a straight face, solemnly told us that "my duty must take precedence over all", roared "your TARDIS is revoked!" and "I'm playing with a fire so dangerous I could scorch eternity," and allowed innocent people to die for the Greater Good.  In the New Adventures, he turned out to be a mystical figure called The Other who threw himself into a "time loom" and bonded with a Time Lord called Theta Sigma. He also turned out to have deliberately killed the sixth Doctor because he was in danger of embarking down "the road that leads to the Valeyard [the Doctor's evil alter ego]" and "someone needed to take over and become the Ka Faraq Gatri [destroyer of worlds, bringer of darkness, oncoming storm]." The one portrayed in Death Comes to Time, meanwhile, turned out to have omnipotent power to hold back the deaths of those he cared about and vaporise entire spaceships at a single command, but was  charged never to use this power. I'd have to agree with Roberts that this is a much less interesting version of the character. It may have gone wrong in the 1990s, but this "player of chess" movement started in 1988-89.

Elsewhere in 1988-89, Timothy Dalton was James Bond and Michael Keaton was Batman. To what extent can we see Dalton-Bond as part of this "time for our heroes to grow up" situation? It's tricky, because the spectre of Ian Fleming has always hung over any shifts in the franchise, and it seems likely that, as in 1981's For Your Eyes Only, Cubby Broccoli was motivated more by a desire to get back to the series's roots and to Fleming rather than anything to do with developments in the comics world. What probably does link the worlds of Bond, comics and Doctor Who are two things: postmodernism (in the vague bastardised meaning of the word), and the rise of fandom. Regarding the former, Philip Pullman's analogy of Adam and Eve realising they were naked is probably still the most apt here, accounting for that peculiar phrasing in EM Forster's "Dear me, oh, dear me, yes, the novel tells a story." Embarrassment and shame arrive, and we realise that we're allowing ourselves to be entertained. Novels like Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Paul Auster's New York Trilogy do the same thing with detective thrillers: we're solemnly told that the detective can never uncover the truth, that meaning is endlessly deferred and that no satisfying climax or denounement can be reached. The trouble is, an actual thriller writer -  Raymond Chandler -  did this so much better: and he could make his thrillers thrilling as well. A favourite teacher of mine at university responded to my suggestion that Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 would have been more interesting had it featured a scene where Oedipa is captured and taken by the Trystero organisation to their lair. "But that would be like something out of a 007 film," she replied. Yes, I replied (internally, a few weeks later), but wouldn't that also be better? Wouldn't that dramatise Pynchon's obsessions with entropy, conspiracy theories, and make them more interesting and vital? Wouldn't it breathe life into them, instead of dropping them into the narrative like stones? To be fair, the postmodern detective trend also gave us Dennis Potter's magnificent The Singing Detective, but that works because it's about the author of the mystery: the detective sections would be unsatisfying if broadcast on their own.

To move to the second point, the rise of fandom resulted in generations of fans demanding respectability, a situation still with us today. From the 1980s onwards, they've hated the casting of Bonnie Langford in Doctor Who, the bit with the miniature Doctor in Last of the Timelords, the batnipples on the suits in the Joel Schumacher Batman films and the comedy scenes in Superman 3, and they wanted a "back to Fleming" approach after the silliness of Moonraker. For Your Eyes Only started the dour/camp cycle (although You Only Live Twice/On Her Majesty's Secret Service prefigured it). The biggest fear in fandom is that of embarrassment: they want something they can show their girlfriends, something that the mainstream media can assimilate more comfortably. Steven Moffat's comments for a 1995 fanzine interview(http://nzdwfc.tetrap.com/archive/tsv43/onediscussion.html)

summed it up well:

It's not that I don't like it, but I wouldn't care to show it to my friends in television and say look, I think this is a great programme, because I think they might fling me out... Unless I chose my episodes very carefully, I couldn't sit anybody I work with in television down in front of Doctor Who and say 'watch this, this is a great show...What I resented was having to go to school two days later, and my friends knew I watched this show. They'd go 'Did you see the giant rat?!' and I'd have to say I thought there was dramatic integrity elsewhere.

That's the kind of peer pressure-conscious response (is there any more detestably unDoctorWhoish phrase than "my friends in television"?) that filmmakers are so keen to avoid, and why Moffat's own run on Doctor Who is careful to avoid the idyosncratic, the untested and the non-audience friendly (Twilight good, Sylvester McCoy bad: that's how the sworn enemies of this blog think, and while you'll never get another Love and Monsters under Moffat, which is their triumph and my bane). Skyfall is the slickest, cleverest example of FEP (Fanboy Embarrassment Prevention) yet. As I've said elsewhere on this blog, will we see a dark, gritty reinvention of Harry Potter in a couple of decades' time?

Yet...Skyfall is good-natured entertainment , made with loving care. Its quietly elegiac tone is affecting, and it's a fine lesson in how less is more: the climax, which as someone said to me on Twitter, resembles an

explosion-filled episode of Last of the Summer Wine, is the stuff of legend. It's got Bond returning home, it's got Bond hiding in the same priest hole where he took refuge when he heard his parents had died, it's got Albert Finney as a grizzled gamekeeper who taught Bond to shoot and was there when his parents died, and must now do both again, it's got the Aston Martin DB5 and its modifications appearing again in such an Excalibur-like fashion that it doesn't matter at all that this makes no sense in terms of dating or continuity, it's got Bond's surrogate parent dying yards from the grave of his original parents. Bond's line "I never liked this place anyway" before the most satisfying explosion I've seen in any action movie, the way Bond looks at Kincaid when he realises M's gunshot wound is terminal and M's line "I fucked this up didn't I?" are the stuff of iconic heroic drama. The film knows that Craig and Dench performing scenes like this together is as good as any FX fireworks.

Daniel Craig's triumph is in his ability to get dramatic weight out of taciturnity: compare the film with the duff scene in GoldenEye with Bond and Natalya on the beach. Bond is sitting there looking very taciturn indeed, and Natalya asks how he can be so cold. "It's what keeps me alive." says Bond. "It's what keeps you alone," replies Natalya. They then embrace, and the moment of taciturnity passes. The scene screams "interlude": you sense that everyone in the cinema is thinking "let's move on to the action," but in Skyfall hearing that Bond hid in the priesthole for two days after his parents were killed is as gripping as the action. Die Another Day featured a neat revelation: Gustav Graves has modellled his new appearance on Bond. "Just in the details," he taunts Bond, "That unjustified sneer: a defence mechanism concealing such inadequacy."' The trouble is, it's only there for that one scene. Skyfall manages to dramatise Bond's taciturnity, so that it feels like a poignant theme central to the entire film rather than a few lines that sound cool when heard in the trailer but which just sit there in the film (Miranda Frost's "a man no-one can get close to" speech in Die Another Day is another example of the latter, which was indeed plundered from for the trailer, and Scaramanga's suggestion that the two of them have much in common in The Man With The Golden Gun is yet another). The word-test scene in Skyfall may have proved ideal for the teaser trailer, but it's clearly not just there for that reason: it's part of the emotional core of the story, it sets up the theme as well as the narrative of the climax, and Craig is able to convey, in his reaction to the key word, the sense that this means something to him, whilst Brosnan was unable to respond to Graves's slurs with anything other than a quip (raising his pistol: "my defence mechanism is right here" - a moment that also compares poorly with the splendid moment in Skyfall where Bond is entirely unintimidated by Silva's come-on and even teases back with the line "what makes you so sure this is my first time?" It's a little moment that makes Bond a more three-dimensional, interesting figure.

   The use of humour has also vastly improved: instead of the "quips" of Brosnan, Connery and Moore and the humourlessness of Dalton, we have humour based on warmth and character details. Bond's "deep water" line is my favourite: the quips are now portrayed as something Bond - rather than the audience - likes, and this exchange becomes a splendidly poignant final moment between Bond and M. Equally good is the exchange between them about Bond's obituary, the ejector seat gag, the shooting practice scene with Bond and Kincaid and the aforementioned payoff with the bulldog figurine. This is proper humour.

Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, even more so than Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, shaped the dreams of my boyhood. It's not their fault this film was spoilt for me by overpraise

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.