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I've been critical of the About Time series over the years which Mad Norwegian have been publishing the books; mainly because several of the asides throughout, usually those apparently intended to familiarize non-British people with points of British culture and history relevant to Doctor Who's development or features of particular stories which might seem odd out of context, have been misleading or simply inaccurate. I'm pleased to report that About Time 6 offers far fewer opportunities for me to complain. It wasn't until page 322 that I saw the assertion that if Ace came from 1987 she would have done GCSEs, not O-Levels, which (as someone who took his O-Levels in 1987) I know is not the case. (I was the last year to take O-Levels, though my English Language and Literature grades resulted from a combined pilot project for GCSE, then called the '16+ exam'.) Otherwise I am for the most part admiring of author Tat Wood's erudition, gathered widely across the arts and sciences, as I have been ever since I first borrowed a copy of Spectrox from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gervase_fen. (This was never returned to him, being instead lost by Royal Mail, and was probably mistaken for another kind of publication entirely.) Just don't treat endnote 34, on page 404, as a reliable short account of the reasons for and the end of the political proscription of Roman Catholics in England between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, nor indeed of the confessional allegiance of the majority of the Scottish population during this time.
Tat Wood is the sole author of this book, the project having been conceived by Lawrence Miles and then published, until now, under the names of both Miles and Wood. There's a credit for Mad Norwegian publisher Lars Pearson as the author of additional material on the back cover; and Rob Shearman is thanked for providing the defence for The Two Doctors. (From an interview Wood gave the Tachyon TV podcast, it may have been Miles's interpretation of this story which led to the break between the two contributors.) This volume displays a greater consistency in tone and in argument than its predecessors, in addition to a lower number of obvious (to me) cultural errors, and this is welcome.
When Wood writes (page 8) that in 1985 a videotape of The Tomb of the Cybermen "was believed [to] be able to cure warts with a single touch and convert water to butterscotch-flavoured Angel Delight (the special treat you had while watching Doctor Who in 1967)" this reviewer immediately feels at home; though he doubts that he ever ate butterscotch Angel Delight in front of Doctor Who, and he wasn't born in 1967. More than any other book in the About Time series, this volume emerges as a letter from 'old' fandom to 'new' fandom, intimating (though not explicitly explaining) why some people who were fans in the 1980s and early 1990s appear hostile to some elements in the post-2005 series - or 'the Welsh series' as Wood comes to call it - and parsing the cultural differences between 'old' fandom and the fan culture one can find on the internet today. Particularly relevant are the essays 'What's All This Stuff About Anoraks?'
Wood's probably right to have more sympathy with those who find parallels between traditional Doctor Who fandom and football fandom or the early punk scene - though I'd disagree that the latter was the only begetter of Doctor Who fanzine culture as Wood seems to think. There's a very true description of early 1990s fanzinedom:
There were lots of moments (in the early hours of this morning, mainly) where I found myself laughing in agreement at Wood's assessments, and I'm in agreement with most of them. There are occasional moments of unnecessary cruelty, such as the attack on John Gummer who seemed to me one of the more human Conservative ministers of the 1980s and 1990s, and a few slightly-too idealistic views of the 1984 miners' strike. There are a couple of mentions of Biggles (at least one in the context of James Saxon's appearance in The Two Doctors and in the Biggles film of the mid-80s) which seem to underestimate the character's longevity. The reasons the Doctor Who of the time doesn't quite work are explored in detail. Timelash comes from "the Ninth Circle, obviously", but there are repeated references to the misconceptions this story has about H.G. Wells, and why it's easier to assume that 'Herbert' isn't the author of The Time Machine and lover of Rebecca West (among many others), and how the story reflects ambiguity in 1985 about the rise of the surveillance society in Britain. More problematic is the book's view on the start of the second Colin Baker season, the post-'Suspension' (as it is termed here) season 23. Wood thinks that The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet suffers from too much creative ambiguity, deriving from "playing it safe" when this was no longer possible; though there doesn't seem to be a suggestion as to what risks could have been taken. Wood hails the McCoy era as a "creative renaissance" but, rightly, doesn't let this preclude him listing and analysing the many flaws in the plotting of and thinking behind many of the stories he nonetheless thinks the most successful, like The Greatest Show in the Galaxy or The Curse of Fenric. Survival probably comes off best of the McCoy stories.
"Does Paul McGann count?" asks the essay accompanying the chapter on the 1996 TV Movie, and the answer seems to be a yes, though this doesn't mean that one necessarily has to accept what one sees on screen in the film as Doctor Who, in Wood's book. One of the best questions asked by the essays is "Who Narrates this Programme?" My answer would have been 'lots of narrators', because I've come to use the idea of different voices, or interpreters of the 'events' in the Doctor's 'life', as being the most practical way of dealing with inconsistencies in the ongoing narrative. Tat Wood goes with something similar, suggesting that a new narrator takes over with Rose, though unlike him I view the 2005+ series as essentially the same thing as that broadcast between 1963 and 1989 and in 1996.
The only obvious chapter missing from the volume is a conclusion; if everything from 1963 to 1989, and the 1996 TV Movie, is to be considered as a single entity, then I'd like to know what Wood thinks Doctor Who is beyond the assertions throughout this book that we, the reader, must know by now; it could have taken the form of an extended afterword explaining why the 'Welsh series' is, in Wood's view, different. He indicates throughout that explaining its cultural context will be someone else's job, several years from now. Given that one of the assumptions seemingly present in the first book to be published, About Time 3, was that Doctor Who was a product of a particular cultural moment in Britain that had passed, the success of the last three series could have been addressed in an afterword too. Perhaps the revised About Time 3, due out next year and expanded by Wood without Miles's input to take account of the impact of the new series on perceptions of the Pertwee era, will give some hints.
gervase_fen. (This was never returned to him, being instead lost by Royal Mail, and was probably mistaken for another kind of publication entirely.) Just don't treat endnote 34, on page 404, as a reliable short account of the reasons for and the end of the political proscription of Roman Catholics in England between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, nor indeed of the confessional allegiance of the majority of the Scottish population during this time.Tat Wood is the sole author of this book, the project having been conceived by Lawrence Miles and then published, until now, under the names of both Miles and Wood. There's a credit for Mad Norwegian publisher Lars Pearson as the author of additional material on the back cover; and Rob Shearman is thanked for providing the defence for The Two Doctors. (From an interview Wood gave the Tachyon TV podcast, it may have been Miles's interpretation of this story which led to the break between the two contributors.) This volume displays a greater consistency in tone and in argument than its predecessors, in addition to a lower number of obvious (to me) cultural errors, and this is welcome.
When Wood writes (page 8) that in 1985 a videotape of The Tomb of the Cybermen "was believed [to] be able to cure warts with a single touch and convert water to butterscotch-flavoured Angel Delight (the special treat you had while watching Doctor Who in 1967)" this reviewer immediately feels at home; though he doubts that he ever ate butterscotch Angel Delight in front of Doctor Who, and he wasn't born in 1967. More than any other book in the About Time series, this volume emerges as a letter from 'old' fandom to 'new' fandom, intimating (though not explicitly explaining) why some people who were fans in the 1980s and early 1990s appear hostile to some elements in the post-2005 series - or 'the Welsh series' as Wood comes to call it - and parsing the cultural differences between 'old' fandom and the fan culture one can find on the internet today. Particularly relevant are the essays 'What's All This Stuff About Anoraks?'
"Michael Grade made jokes about how the Doctor Who fans probably didn't have girlfriends and we laughed along - because the joke was on him, really"and 'The Semiotic Thickness of What?' from which endnote 30 waves a red flag at latterday fandom in a fashion I find disappointingly non-inclusive:
"Slash is assuredly a minority hobby, and British fans just don't do it... well, we should clarify that. Fans of the pre-2005 stuff generally don't. Fans of the Welsh series sometimes do, but they're usually part of the British Public, and not what we commonly regard as Doctor Who fandom. Most of us hadn't heard the term "slash" until the Jenkins/Tulloch Tag-Team of Terror casually informed us that this was what we spent our waking hours doing.")
Wood's probably right to have more sympathy with those who find parallels between traditional Doctor Who fandom and football fandom or the early punk scene - though I'd disagree that the latter was the only begetter of Doctor Who fanzine culture as Wood seems to think. There's a very true description of early 1990s fanzinedom:
"Fan A would be sat in a university library, nonchalantly reading Mikhail Bakthin's Problems of Dostoievski's Poetics, when suddenly s/he would see the handy spotter's guide to the Menippean Satires in Chapter 4 and think "So that's why I prefer Season Six to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"
There were lots of moments (in the early hours of this morning, mainly) where I found myself laughing in agreement at Wood's assessments, and I'm in agreement with most of them. There are occasional moments of unnecessary cruelty, such as the attack on John Gummer who seemed to me one of the more human Conservative ministers of the 1980s and 1990s, and a few slightly-too idealistic views of the 1984 miners' strike. There are a couple of mentions of Biggles (at least one in the context of James Saxon's appearance in The Two Doctors and in the Biggles film of the mid-80s) which seem to underestimate the character's longevity. The reasons the Doctor Who of the time doesn't quite work are explored in detail. Timelash comes from "the Ninth Circle, obviously", but there are repeated references to the misconceptions this story has about H.G. Wells, and why it's easier to assume that 'Herbert' isn't the author of The Time Machine and lover of Rebecca West (among many others), and how the story reflects ambiguity in 1985 about the rise of the surveillance society in Britain. More problematic is the book's view on the start of the second Colin Baker season, the post-'Suspension' (as it is termed here) season 23. Wood thinks that The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet suffers from too much creative ambiguity, deriving from "playing it safe" when this was no longer possible; though there doesn't seem to be a suggestion as to what risks could have been taken. Wood hails the McCoy era as a "creative renaissance" but, rightly, doesn't let this preclude him listing and analysing the many flaws in the plotting of and thinking behind many of the stories he nonetheless thinks the most successful, like The Greatest Show in the Galaxy or The Curse of Fenric. Survival probably comes off best of the McCoy stories.
"Does Paul McGann count?" asks the essay accompanying the chapter on the 1996 TV Movie, and the answer seems to be a yes, though this doesn't mean that one necessarily has to accept what one sees on screen in the film as Doctor Who, in Wood's book. One of the best questions asked by the essays is "Who Narrates this Programme?" My answer would have been 'lots of narrators', because I've come to use the idea of different voices, or interpreters of the 'events' in the Doctor's 'life', as being the most practical way of dealing with inconsistencies in the ongoing narrative. Tat Wood goes with something similar, suggesting that a new narrator takes over with Rose, though unlike him I view the 2005+ series as essentially the same thing as that broadcast between 1963 and 1989 and in 1996.
The only obvious chapter missing from the volume is a conclusion; if everything from 1963 to 1989, and the 1996 TV Movie, is to be considered as a single entity, then I'd like to know what Wood thinks Doctor Who is beyond the assertions throughout this book that we, the reader, must know by now; it could have taken the form of an extended afterword explaining why the 'Welsh series' is, in Wood's view, different. He indicates throughout that explaining its cultural context will be someone else's job, several years from now. Given that one of the assumptions seemingly present in the first book to be published, About Time 3, was that Doctor Who was a product of a particular cultural moment in Britain that had passed, the success of the last three series could have been addressed in an afterword too. Perhaps the revised About Time 3, due out next year and expanded by Wood without Miles's input to take account of the impact of the new series on perceptions of the Pertwee era, will give some hints.
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