nwhyte's reviews
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Midnight by Philip Purser-Hallard

challenging medium-paced

4.0

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/midnight-by-philip-purser-hallard-and-russell-t-davies/

I wrote this story up at some length back in 2009:

We rewatched Midnight last night. I wrote previously that I couldn’t understand why this story didn’t get a Hugo nomination this year; I am still baffled.

I think it’s the best episode of the season, and certainly the best ever written by Russell T Davies. The sources are good sources – The Edge of Destruction, also written at the last minute by Old Who’s first script editor, putting the Tardis crew in a single set for 50 minutes; also I think Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust, where a group of tourists is trapped on the Moon, though without the sinister alien presence. (The eye of faith may detect inspiration also from Delta and the Bannermen, or The Leisure Hive, but personally I don’t.) Davies takes this and puts his own particular interpretation onto the situation, and for once his writing remains tight up to the last moment.

He’s helped by a couple of stellar performances – Lesley Sharp as Sky and the unnamed baddie, and Rakie Ayola as the hostess in particular; also from the past we have David Troughton as the Professor, and from the future Colin Morgan as Jethro. The scenes with Lesley Sharp first echoing, then synching with, then anticipating the other cast members’ lines are just incredible. (The only irritating moment is Rose’s brief appearance, which is difficult to reconcile with what we later find out she’s been doing – the similar moment in The Poison Sky is at least set in the present day.)

Quite apart from the creepiness of the basic concept, it’s a story where the Doctor’s normal cockiness and air of mystery, which normally seem to get authority figures magically co-operating with him, work against him; and his fellow passengers end up baying for his blood. It’s notable that they are not, particularly, authority figures; and the one who is nominally in charge, the Hostess, ends up being the one who saves them all. And the specific point where the Doctor’s credibility breaks down completely is when he tries to urge compassion, which rather more often works to shame other characters into cooperating. It’s a great subversion and stretching of the show’s usual assumptions.

After two stories where we’ve had the Doctor’s own intimate relations (his daughter and River Song) on screen, here we have the Doctor observing and interacting with several other family dynamics – Biff, Val and Jethro; the Professor and Dee Dee; Sky and her absent ex; perhaps also the Hostess and the crew. (Indeed, it might have been better if this had been shown between The Doctor’s Daughter and Silence in the Library, as was originally planned.)

Midnight was Russell T Davies’ nineteenth story for Who, which puts him ahead of the 18 stories written entirely or partly by Robert Holmes. [We are far past that now.] Andy Murray suggests (in his piece in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space) that we can see the frustrated attempts of the tall, fair-haired Chancellor Goth to hunt down and destroy the Doctor as the tall, fair-haired Holmes working through his own frustration with the central character of the show. Note that in this story the Doctor loses his authority over the other passengers and even his voice, and that he is actually killed off at the beginning of the next story; am I going too far in detecting a subconscious desire to get rid of him on the part of the executive producer and chief writer? (Not that there is the same physical resemblance between RTD and the villain of either story.)

Two further pieces of trivia from the BBC via Wikipedia: it is the first story since Genesis of the Daleks where the Tardis does not appear, and the only Who story where the villain is never named.

(Robert Holmes’ 18 stories: The Krotons, The Space Pirates, Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons, Carnival of Monsters, The Time Warrior, The Deadly Assassin, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Sun Makers, The Ribos Operation, The Power of Kroll, The Caves of Androzani, The Two Doctors, and The Mysterious Planet plus also The Ark In Space, The Brain of Morbius, Pyramids of Mars and the first episode of The Ultimate Foe. Of course, in screen time he is still well ahead of RTD, since all but one of the above were at least the equivalent of four 25-minute episodes.)

I also just rewatched 73 Yards, another of RTD’s best scripts, but I still think that Midnight has yet to be surpassed among his stories. (Though my favourite New Who story remains Blink.) Since then we’ve seen a couple of the actors elsewhere – Rakie Ayola, the hostess here, was Persephone in Kaos, and Ayesha Antoine, who is David Troughton’s sidekick Dee Dee here, has been Bernice Summerfield’s companion Ruth in the Big Finish audio series, and was also a lead in the DALEKS! webcastby James Goss. 

Philip Purser-Hallard’s Black Archive is businesslike and looks at the reasons for the story’s success (including off the screen, live on stage). The first chapter, ‘A Failure of the Entertainment System’, recounts the very brief history of how the story was written, drawing comparisons with The Edge of Destruction, and touches on how it subverts the generally heroic and successful portrayal of the Doctor.

The second chapter, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, and Variations’, looks at each of the guest characters in the story, exploring what they are telling us about their society and about the Doctor. Purser-Hallard draws a comparison with RTD’s more recent drama Years and Years, which also has a very tight ensemble of central characters 9and which I also enjoyed very much).

The third chapter, ‘He Started It, With His Stories’, considers the (multiple) fairy tale and mythic roots of Midnight, with a look also at Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

The fourth chapter, ‘Not a Goblin or a Monster’, looks at invisible evil in the context of Davies’ other work (Years and Years again, and The Second Coming) and also Steven Moffat’s story Listen.

The fifth chapter, ‘The Cleverest Voice in the Room’, looks at the less heroic aspects of the Doctor as a character and notes that some of the most popular Who stories actually show the central character in a less than positive light. Again, other RTD work is mentioned; I noted particularly A Very English Scandal., but Purser-Hallard also looks at how the Fourteenth Doctor stories form a coda to the Tenth Doctor era.

An appendix, ‘What’s the Next Stage?’, looks at three theatrical productions of Midnight, which out of the whole 61 years of the show’s history is surely the story best suited for a stage production.

So, a thought-provoking monograph on a great Who story; and when you unpick the reasons for why it is so great, the greatness is still there.

New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi - A Biography by Roger Boyes, Suzy Jagger

emotional fast-paced

4.0

1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England by W.C. Sellar

funny lighthearted fast-paced

5.0

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/1066-and-all-that-by-w-c-sellar-and-r-j-yeatman/

A cheerful return to an old favourite: the spoof version of English history, cantering through two thousand years with a series of unlikely and yet very probable misreadings. There’s not much more to be said; some of the humour has dated, but a lot of it remains very funny.

He also invented a game called “Bluff King Hal” which he invited his ministers to play with him. The players were blindfolded and knelt down with their heads on a block of wood; they then guessed who the King would marry next

The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future, 1730-1810 by Jenny Uglow

reflective medium-paced

4.0

Why I Write by George Orwell

informative medium-paced

5.0

This is a nice collection of four essays by Orwell, three very short and one much longer, and I'm going to treat them separately, because that gives me an excuse to inflict Orwell's gorgeous prose on you several times.

"Why I Write"

An interesting bit of self-reflection in which Orwell starts by describing his own artistic growth, and then the impact of politics on his thoughts and words. But he finished with a description which I recognise from some writers who I have known:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

"The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius"

The longest essay in the book, taking up more than two thirds of the 120 pages. On the one hand, it's very much moored in the particular time it was written - 1941, when it was not at all clear who was going to win the war - and with a particular agenda in mind - the necessity and inevitability of a Socialist government which would win the war and modernise Britain. In fact, of course, the Labour victory came only after the war was over, though it's certainly fair to say that the war could not have been won without the social changes that came with it. On the other, some of Orwell's observations are simply brilliant.

Since the ’fifties every war in which England has engaged has started off with a series of disasters, after which the situation has been saved by people comparatively low in the social scale. The higher commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to admit to themselves that the world was changing. They have always clung to obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a repetition of the last. Before the Boer War they prepared for the Zulu War, before the 1914 for the Boer War, and before the present war for 1914. Even at this moment hundreds of thousands of men in England are being trained with the bayonet, a weapon entirely useless except for opening tins.

When I posted that last sentence admiringly to Facebook, lots of people jumped on me with examples of successful bayonet charges since Orwell wrote; but his point is that the soldiers were not being taught anything else.

"A Hanging"

A detailed account of an execution in a jail in Burma, effectively and efficiently conveying the horror and pointlessness of the situation.

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. ‘You'd better all come out and have a drink,’ he said quite genially. ‘I've got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it.’

"Politics and the English Language"

This is a tremendous piece on writing clearly. He is particularly interested in political writing, which he felt was especially bad:

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.

I don't know if things have improved much since Orwell's day. But his six rules for good writing should be on the wall of everyone who writes for a living, or indeed for a hobby:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

The God Complex by Paul Driscoll

informative slow-paced

3.25

The God Complex is one of my less favourite episodes in one of my less favourite series of New Who, and I didn't write it up at the time, nor did I recommended it in my epic "Which New Who to Watch" post. In case you need your memory refreshed, it's the one where the Doctor, Amy and Rory are stuck in a hotel with a few other characters, of whom the best developed is Rita, played by Amara Karan; but it turns out that the hotel is a prison for a Minotaur. Personally I didn't feel that the plot held together at all, and the scene at the end, where the Doctor basically kicks Amy and Rory out of the Tardis to start their lives without him, was disappointingly underdeveloped. But others differ, and Driscoll is clearly a fan, finding a lot more depth to it than I had imagined was there. The chapters are as follows:

• The symbolism of the Minotaur, and modern treatments of the story in and beyond Doctor Who;
• The roots of the story in Orwell's 1984 (surveillance in particular);
• The roots of the story in The Shining, film rather than book (hotel horror, obviously, though he also blames it for the weakness of the closing scene);
• The roots of the story in previous Who stories about bases under siege and about religion (though I think he misses a couple of interesting examples on religion);
• A rather good chapter on fear and terror as storytelling devices;
• A more confused chapter trying to work out what the story is trying to tell us about faith and religion;
• A long chapter on the Doctor's fallibility as a hero;
• A chapter on the role of the companions in Doctor Who;
• a concluding short chapter wondering what the hell the symbolism of the fishbowl is meant to be?

Driscoll likes the story more than I did, but is not unaware of its flaws.

Neither Unionist Nor Nationalist: The 10th (Irish) Division in the Great War by Stephen Sandford

informative slow-paced

2.5

My grandfather fought in the First World War with the 6th battallion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and indeed ended the war as its commanding officer; the 6th Dubs were part of the 10th (Irish) Division, which mainly fought in the east - Gallipoli, Macedonia and Palestine. This book is full of detail about the nature of the Division, which unlike the 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions was not aligned with either Nationalism or Unionism. I found it a bit hard to get through. There are lots and lots of statistics about the background of the soldiers, especially the officers, and the comparative disciplinary record; the actual fighting occupies only 22 pages, less than 10% of the book; only two maps are reproduced, and they are not much help in trying to understand the narrative. There is a rather poor chapter analysing military leadership as demonstrated in the Division's own leaders, and a better one on the lessons learned, or not learned, about military tactics in the course of the campaign. I couldn't really recommend it to anyone who isn't a First World War completist. 

The Doctor: His Lives and Times by James Goss

funny lighthearted fast-paced

4.0

One of the glossy volumes produced by the BBC in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who - and isn't it weird that we'll get to the 60th anniversary next year? This is really very nice indeed. For each Doctor, we get an account of the TV stories written from the perspective of one or more of the characters - Susan, Ian Chesterton, the Brigadier, occasionally the Doctor himself - combined with a collage of other mocked-up material, of which one of my favourites is a Salamander election poster. Each chapter then includes a box on the lead actor, and an assembly of quotes about the making of the show from those who were involved. There are also a few short commentaries on individual stories by guest commentators, most of whom have strong connections with the show, the exception being Sir Tim Berners-Lee on The War Machines. As my regular reader knows, I rate James Goss very highly as one of the best Who writers, and this really doesn't disappoint. It's the sort of thing that could, perhaps, be easily updated to include the next ten years and two Doctors for 2023; and would it be too much to hope that such an update could also include Torchwood, the Sarah Jane Adventures and Class?

The Wandering Scholars of the Middle Ages by Helen Waddell

challenging informative fast-paced

4.0

This was the book that made the reputation of Helen Waddell, the medievalist from my own corner of County Down. It's a study of the lyrical tradition of poetry in the Middle Ages in Europe, tracing influences across geographies and cultures. I found the writing very dense; written very chattily as if these were all people whose reputations we already knew, with minimal context and footnotes mostly to works available only in well-equipped university libraries. I'm really surprised that it did so well on publication in 1927; perhaps the readers of the 1920s were more au fait with early medieval literature than I am.

Still there are some fascinating details in there. It's always interesting to be reminded of the career of Gerbert of Aurillac, which is crying out for an accessible biographical treatment, either factual or fictional. The same goes for the murky story of the Viking Siegfried (or Sifrid, as Waddell calls him). There's the mysterious figure of the Archpoet. And more locally it's interesting to see Liège popping up as an important centre of culture.

She supplies a lot of translations of the lyrics, to which she brings her own good ear for a phrase; I'm glad I have read this at last, and I'll put some of Helen Waddell's other works on my reading list now.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

challenging slow-paced

4.0

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I had read a lot of very disappointed commentary, and was prepared for masses of dry infodump, but in fact I thought it was quite a good, if old-fashioned, example of the "My God! What if..." aspirations of sf. Despite the almost 900-page length I kept turning the pages. There are some serious problems: the reason why the Moon explodes at the start of the book is never explained, the celebrity cameos are just a bit annoying, the Evil Woman President is much more annoying than that, and the last section of the book, which is set literally 5000 years after the rest, should really have been a separate novel and could actually have been expanded a bit more. Nevertheless, I warmed to it enough to give it my second preference.