Articles in “Television”

In honour of the controversial ending to season four of Doctor Who, I want to run through, in a diffuse and undirected fashion, something that’s been bothering me for a while.

I want people to stop telling me what criteria I need to meet before I can call myself a Doctor Who fan.

Sure, no one’s actually telling me this in person, but I’m seeing blanket statements more and more often, and they’re frustrating me.

I was surfing around the other day, looking for a version of Tim Bisley’s rant about The Phantom Menace from Spaced so I could quote it in a comment thread, and I came across another version of this statement on a blog I’d never visited before.

I’m not going to link to the blog, because that’s not important: the author is entitled to their opinion (which is, in a nutshell, what this post is about), and it was just one more iteration of the comment that’s been bothering me.

And that comment, paraphrased, is this: You’re not a fan of Doctor Who unless you get all gushy about the Doctor’s relationship with Rose.

Well, I don’t get particularly gushy over the relationship, but I see no reason why my fandom should be constrained or questioned as a result.

Why am I not particularly invested in that relationship? Many reasons.

Partly, it has to do with the fact that I found Rose thoroughly whiny at the end of season four, and lost much of the sympathy I’d previously had for her as a result.

But partly it has to do with the fact that Rose’s relationship with the Doctor opened up the subsequent unrequited-love angle for Martha and the argument, which I still see posted on various sites, that obviously Donna is in love with the Doctor: everyone is in love with the Doctor.

This argument, to me, has shades of another old chestnut that I despise: Men and women can’t ever really be friends, because sex keeps getting in the way.

I can’t count the number of ways in which that statement frustrates me, but here are a few:

• it’s patronising: not everyone is locked into a mode of thought where a sexual relationship is the only possible relationship.

• it’s deeply heternormative: what if one member of the pairing is gay? What if both are? And what on earth does this suggest about our friendships with people who aren’t heterosexual?

• it suggests we should live in a climate of trepidation, suspecting that everyone we meet wants something from us that they’re hiding behind a facade of friendship, and if we ever acknowledge that facade, the whole friendship will crumble.

• where do married couples or couples in other forms of long-term committed relationships fit in here?

It seems to me that Rose’s relationship with the Doctor has opened Doctor Who up to this type of reading. I can’t fathom how it is possible to read Donna as in love with the Doctor, but no text is translucent, so presumably people are pulling something out of it that I’m not seeing.

But this is only my personal problem with the programme. When I watched it as a child, there was no suggestion of this in my mind. (With the possible exception of Romana.) The Doctor has companions, and they travelled the galaxy together, and we all wished we could travel in the TARDIS one day. If anything else was going on, it was going on behind closed doors, and I, for one, never thought about it.

Looking back, I think that was one reason why I liked the show: it was one of the few shows out there that didn’t subscribe to the “men and women can’t be friends” mentality.

Well, those days are over, as far a large proportion of Doctor Who fandom is concerned.

And that’s not the issue with which I have a problem.

I’m not attempting to assert that my view of the programme is the only true and right one.

Fandom is not monolithic.

There are as many different ways of being a fan as there are different ways to read a text, and there are as many ways of reading a text as there are readers (provided the text is of sufficient complexity. I don’t know how many ways there are to read Spot books—though I did once have students demonstrate a brilliant reading of a Spot pop-up book through the conventions of Gothic literature, so maybe I shouldn’t be so restrictive.)

You experience great joy out of being a Rose-Doctor ‘shipper? Great! ‘Ship away!

But don’t dare tell me that if I don’t subscribe to your view of the text then I’m not a fan.

I’m a fan of Doctor Who.

I’ve been a fan of Doctor Who my entire life: I can’t remember a time when I didn’t watch this programme, growing up in the household of parents who started watching the programme in 1963.

I was an open fan of the programme back when Doctor Who fans were unilaterally perceived as anorak-wearing weirdos (though I ascribe no particular virtue to this on my part: I never have been cool).

I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: Doctor Who is blood and bone to me, the only television programme that I’ve ever felt exists under my very skin.

So I don’t gush over the Doctor’s relationship with a recent companion.

Why should I feel compelled to abandon a life-long fandom on those grounds?

If there can only be one, why does it have to be Christopher Lambert?

Feel free to dispute my claim, but I’m sticking by it.

Perhaps the most perfect pop song of the 1980s, anyway. (Although another contender for that title would be “Levi Stubbs’ Tears.” Nick’s vote is for “Just Like Heaven,” and I’m not going to dispute that, either.)

And, really, what is there not to like about Madness?

There were so many of them! There’s a band who didn’t feel that there was any point in restricting their numbers.

Plus, they wrote a gorgeous song about a teenage boy trying to buy his first packet of condoms, but being distracted by his own embarrassment—which made him speak entirely in euphemisms—and by the fact that his neighbours kept coming into the chemist’s.

And, as if that weren’t sufficient reason to love Madness, they also appeared in two separate episodes of The Young Ones, which would be sufficient in itself to make me love them. (Especially since most of the bands who played The Young Ones have since completely disappeared—except Motorhead. That was odd.)

But thinking about The Young Ones led me to Google Alexei Sayle and his biscuit quote, find this:

That’s a Zapata moustache, ennit? He’s Mexican, wasn’t he, eh? Funny, really, you know, Zapata. He starts out as a peasant revolutionary, and ends up as a kind of moustache. Che Guevara, he’s another one. South American revolutionary, ends up as a sort of boutique. Garibaldi, Italian revolutionary, ends up as a kind of biscuit. It’s quite interesting, you know, the number of biscuits that are named after revolutionaries. You’ve got your Garibaldi, of course, you’ve got your Bourbons, then of course you’ve got your Peek Freens Trotsky Assortment.

And then laugh so hard I made myself cough horribly.

But I can’t really blame Madness for that.

Thanks to Laura, who commented on this post about Jane Austen sequels, I’ve now found out about this:

Lost in Austen.

According to Wikipedia—and why wouldn’t we believe what Wikipedia says?—it’s a four-part series about an Austen fan who switches places with Elizabeth Bennet via a magical door in the former’s bathroom.

Oooh-er.

I honestly don’t think my life could have been complete had I never found out about this. Sure, I may have had professional success, perhaps children, a successful personal relationship, many joys—but there would have been an aching hole and, since this scenario depends on me never finding out about Lost in Austen, I would never have known why that hole was there.

Okay, that was marking-induced, semi-hysterical hyperbole. (And let that be a lesson to you, Nick: he tried to claim earlier that “I don’t like cushions” was hyperbole, instead of a negative comment on my decorating abilities.)

But, hyperbole aside, I would very much like to see this programme.

I mentioned it to Nick, and his response was “That looks as though it would be rather fun”—whereupon I stared at him incredulously for about five minutes before exclaiming, “Have you seen my Jasper Fforde novels?”

It also stars Jemima Rooper, whom Nick and I always refer to as “the lesbian ghost,” which I’m sure is so discriminatory a comment that we could be sued in a number of countries. But, though we’ve seen her in a few things—and, unexpectedly, saw her topless in the second part of Perfect Day recently—we always remember her as Cassie’s dead girlfriend in Hex.

I’ll be honest: I don’t know much more about this programme than that the general synopsis hits some primal, geeky, nineteenth-century fiction and fantasy-freak fan-girl button at the base of my spine, making it impossible for me not to watch it.

(I’m also mildly surprised that everyone is thinking “Pride and Prejudice meets Life on Mars“ when I’m thinking “Wasn’t there a sub-plot in a later Thursday Next novel where they ran Pride and Prejudice as a Big-Brother-style reality-TV show?”)

But if you want the opinions of people who know much more about both Austen and the programme than I do, the Austen Blog has been keeping an eye on it, and the fabulous John Sutherland has a piece in the equally wonderful Guardian.

I’m going to watch it regardless.