The Dalek Factor

Out on Blu-ray and DVD this week is the new animation recreating The Evil of the Daleks, a seven-episode Doctor Who story from 1967 of which only episode 2 still survives. The wealth of extras include making-of documentary The Dalek Factor produced by Steve Broster. It includes me rabbiting on a bit wild-eyed and excited to be talking to anyone outside my immediate family.

As the caption says, I wrote a book about The Evil of the Daleks for the Black Archive series, which is still available and rather good.

Ben and Polly in Doctor Who

My new Doctor Who story The Yes Men is out now, starring Frazer Hines as the Second Doctor and companion Jamie McCrimmon, Anneke Wills as Polly and introducing Elliot Chapman as Ben Jackson (a role originally played by the late Michael Craze).

As a vital part of the writing process (or was it prevarication, who can tell?) I watched all the existing Ben and Polly TV episodes and listened to the soundtracks of the rest. On the off-chance it's of interest, here are my thoughts...

The War Machines

The Doctor's new companions

What a delight this story is. There's a special thrill in Doctor Who fighting the internet in 1966 - when the very idea of a computer attached to a phone line was an outlandish, scary concept.

It's also striking to see the First Doctor strolling about in the London of the (then) present day. In the three years that Doctor Who had been running when this story was first broadcast, the TARDIS had landed in the present before - the Doctor lives there in the very first episode and sends his granddaughter to the local school, and later we briefly glimpse the present day in Planet of Giants, The Chase, The Daleks' Master Plan and The Massacre.

But The War Machines, right at the end of the series' third year, and nearly 150 episodes in, is the first adventure fully set in the present and with the Doctor able to interact with people there, and it creates a template for a lot of Doctor Who to come. Russell T Davies' first scripts for "new" Doctor Who in 2005 used the same idea - monsters invade contemporary London and make use of its newest landmarks, while a real-life news presenter comments on events to add a sense that it might actually be happening.

There's something thrilling about the Doctor interrupting a press conference, arguing with MPs and giving the army their orders (indirectly). It's fun seeing him in a nightclub - something I expect the new series would be more wary of now (they certainly wouldn't do the Jimmy Savile joke). I adore Hartnell's daft performance as he's rung up by the evil computer and it tries to scramble his brain. But is it so ridiculous? Something similar happens in the "hard" SF thriller Snowcrash, with a computer recoding people's brains.

Poor companion Dodo is hypnotised and then written out of the series without very much ceremony midway through the story. It's a brutal exit - she and the Doctor don't even say goodbye. The production team seem far more interested in new creations Ben and Polly. Ben's sulky and cross and his dialogue is riddled with glottal stops. Polly's a secretary who likes clubbing and nice clothes, and is as cheery as Ben can be down. He thinks she's posh - and calls her "Duchess". Their class and attitude makes a nice contrast.

In fact, it could have been the start of a different series: the Doctor disappearing in his police box at the end, leaving Ben and Polly to have trendy, sci-fi adventures in contemporary London. Sir Charles Summer (played by William Mervyn, whose son Michael Pickwoad is the production designer on Doctor Who today) would have sent them on special assignments that the usual authorities couldn't get involved in.

Or maybe that's what they got up to when they returned to London after their travels with the Doctor. What about it, Big Finish?

The Smugglers

I'm only sleeping

This is the first story of the fourth series, and that introductory scene in the TARDIS, explaining the concept anew is lovely. It speaks of a production team making a fresh start: the companions contemporary and real whatever strange adventures they might face.

Polly is posh and says "Jolly well", "super" and "fantastic" - it's clear why Ben calls her Duchess. But she's resourceful, contriving her and Ben's escape in episode 2 by using the local people's superstitions and pretending to be a witch. It's fun that just because she wears trousers everyone assumes she's a boy: it neatly avoids any chance of the cliche that she'll be a damsel in distress.

Ben is a clear contrast, all "And we're away, mate," "yobbo", and "'ang on". And he's the one knocked unconscious and made helpless. They use Ben to make Polly more proactive and independent.

It's not the most exciting story but there's plenty to enjoy. It clearly owes a lot to Winston Graham's Poldark books, and I wonder how modern Doctor Who might riff on the latest incarnation of Poldark as played by Aidan Turner. There would have to be a monster. In fact, compare it to the linked The Curse of the Black Spot (2011), which explains what happened to the Captain Avery whose treasure everyone is seeking in this story.

I don't know the Poldark books but wonder if (or hope) the character of Jamaica is based on someone in them, so that the uncomfortable racist cliche is a reference back to the source material rather than something the production team introduced themselves. Because the attitudes to race in the programme at the time are complex, as we see in the next story.

The Tenth Planet

Krang the Cyberman

Polly compares the TARDIS wardrobe to Carnaby Street. We already know (from Marco Polo) that it can supply practical clothes for wherever they might end up in time and space, but now it - and the series - have a sense of contemporary style.

Again, 1960s Doctor Who has a broad canvas even when on Earth. Having been to China and South America, France, Italy and the Middle East, we're now at the South Pole. Compare that to how the show of this time rarely visits the UK. It makes later Doctor Who look almost parochial.

Setting the story in 1986 rather than the far future makes it more real - though Ben doesn't think it's that close, speaking of 1986 as being "still at sea". There's an effort to make this near future international, with different countries and races on screen. Star Trek was doing something similar - but wouldn't be seen in the UK for years. So was it something in the air, a general vision that the future would be more and contentedly mixed? It seems to be linking the confidence and swagger of the space programme with progressive social ideas.

As we discuss in our documentary, Race Against Time (an extra on the DVD of The Mutants):

"Doctor Who's fourth year clearly made an effort to employ more black and Asian actors. The babbling, superstitious pirate, Jamaica, might be a terrible stereotype in 1966's The Smugglers, but that's not true of the next story, The Tenth Planet. 

Set in the far-off future of 1986, the cast of The Tenth Planet included the respected Bermudan actor Earl Cameron as astronaut Glyn Williams. The script specified Williams as Welsh; director Derek Martinus didn't change the script to accommodate his choice of actor, recognising that the astronaut could be both black and Welsh.

(A point I got from the inspiring chapter on the subject in Gary Gillatt's Doctor Who: From A to Z (1998).)

Ben recognises "CO" as Commanding Officer and describes himself as "Able Seaman Ben Jackson, Royal Navy". Though he's in the merchant navy, that made me wonder about his military experience. We don't know Ben's age, but the actor who played him, Michael Craze, was young enough not to have done national service.

Then note in episode 2 Ben's horror at having to kill a Cyberman, insisting that he was forced to do it. There's also his horror at General Cutler's bloodlust. It doesn't seem likely that Ben has killed before. Would the death of the Cyberman haunt him?

The Doctor seems to have met the Cybermen before. Is there an untold story for Big Finish to explore, or is it simply that he remembers (some of) the events of The Five Doctors (1983)?

In episode 3, Polly offers to make coffee. She's less practical and proactive in this story than in The Smugglers, but uses making coffee to get information from the crew. When asked if she's scared, she replies "I am rather." Note: she's resourceful, brave and inventive, but that doesn't mean she's fearless or "strong".

Ben carries a penknife (he just calls it a knife). He's knocked out - as he was in The Smugglers - and again Polly tends him. He refers to Cybermen as "geezers", and says of Polly, "Take it easy love".

A big problem with the story is that events largely happen despite the Doctor and his companions being there. That's in part due to the necessary rewriting around William Hartnell's absence from episode 3. But I think the writers were more interested in their original ideas: the Cybermen, the Arctic base, the state of the world in the near future. Plus there was no script editor to rein them in (since he was one of the co-writers).

And, oh, the loss of episode 4, where the last minutes play out with little dialogue and only atmospheric sound. How strange and eerie were these final moments of the First Doctor?

The Power of the Daleks

In a Dalek's sights

I've talked before about the brilliance of Ben and Polly doubting that this new bloke can really be the Doctor, and that his identity is confirmed by the most unlikely source: a Dalek. In fact, there's a contrast between the companions: Polly believes it's the Doctor, Ben doesn't.

Watching these stories altogether, and getting the context, a new thought occurs to me: that the famous and oft-repeated shot of a Dalek's eye view of the Doctor is an echo of The War Machines, when the First Doctor grips his lapels and doesn't flinch as a robot menaces towards him. Is this consciously making a contrast between the two incarnations?

The story is all about people being people they're not: the Doctor, the Daleks, the base's leaders. Ben and Polly - who we've known for a relatively short while - are the only ones to be who they claim. They're our fixed points in this story.

There's a rare snippet of information about Ben and Polly's lives before they met the Doctor: we learn that Ben grew up opposite a brewery.

In episode 2, Ben says, "Of course the real Doctor was always going on about the Daleks" - but when? The last time they were spoken of was at the beginning of The War Machines, when he mentioned them to Dodo and then remembered she'd not met them either. Ben and Polly weren't there. Each story has run directly into the next one, so there's been no gaps in which to have that conversation.

Ben's dialogue is still very distinctive: he says "Nuts!", "Me ol' china" and "Are you off your 'ead mate?" I double-underlined the Doctor's dialogue:

I know the misery [the Daleks] cause, the destruction. But there's something else more terrible. Something I can only half remember.

Later, his memories of meeting Marco Polo are a bit mixed up, too, as if that adventure happened to someone else. That's a big influence on my script for The Yes Men.

In episode 3, just as Polly instinctively believes the Doctor is who he says he is, she also trusts Quinn without any particular evidence.

As well as the recorder, the Doctor carries a magnifying glass. That's surely a link to Sherlock Holmes, making the Doctor more of an investigator, an active participant.

And there's the first use of catchphrases: "When I say run, run like a rabbit." Episode 4 introduces "I'd like a hat like that."

In episode 5, Polly describes Ben as "a real man", in contrast to Kebble. The suggestion is that Ben can handle himself in a fight, though what evidence has Polly seen of that?

The Highlanders

Meeting Jamie

This is a great story for Polly, where's she independent and resourceful, chiding Highlander Kirsty in episode 1: "There must be something we can do... Crying's no good." In episode 2, she continues: "Didn't the women of your age do anything but cry?"

Polly can also be mean, telling Kirsty, "You're just a stupid peasant". Though perhaps that's her frustration at their predicament, or a way of getting Kirsty to be more helpful.

But Polly has a cruel streak, clearly relishing it as she blackmails Ffinch and calls him "Algy dear."

The Doctor's disguise in episode 1 is another new trademark for this Doctor.

Ben describes Inverness as a "right rat hole".

Jamie is a piper - but do we ever hear him play the bagpipes? At the end of the story, the Doctor says he'll take Jamie with him in the TARDIS if Jamie teaches him to play the bagpipes, but again that's never picked up on in the TV show. (I's something that's gone into The Yes Men.)

Jamie believes in bloodletting. It's, "the only way of curing the sick."

The Doctor with a gun

It seems especially odd in episode 2 to see (in the screengrabs from the missing episodes photographed by John Cura) this incarnation of the Doctor wielding a gun and at such close quarters. Though he does admit, "I'm not very expert with these things," it's a reminder that the "rules" we think of about this incarnation - and of Doctor Who more generally - have not been established.

In episode 4, Ben at last gets a chance to be resourceful, using a Houdini trick he knows to flex his muscles and escape. (The Third Doctor does the same thing in Planet of the Spiders, citing Houdini as a friend, so perhaps there's a story to be told about Ben learning the trick from the man himself.)

Jamie doesn't escape with his friends, he stays behind in Scotland to help the Doctor and the others across the glen and back to the TARDIS. The story was rewritten at the last minute so that Jamie joins the TARDIS, but I find myself wondering how it originally went. Did he escape with Kirsty? When he leaves the Doctor and returns to Scotland in The War Games (1969), is there any chance he'll catch up with her?

The Underwater Menace

Zzzz

Episode 1, scene 2 has the Doctor and his friends discuss where they might go next. Polly and Ben don't seem to be enjoying their adventures: Polly wants to go home to London and Ben is still bothered by his encounter with the Daleks. The Doctor hopes to see prehistoric monsters (again, perhaps there's a story in that.)

Note the short journey times in the TARDIS - since The War Machines, they leave one adventure behind them and are then straight into the next one, with little time to chat let alone have other adventures in between (which is bad news for Big Finish).

In episode 1, Ben calls Polly "love", and says, "You speak foreign". Jamie speaks Gallic. Polly of the Doctor, already recognising the tropes: "I've never seen him go for food like this. It's usually hats."

The story is set sometime after 1968 and the general consensus is that it's 1970, because the next story is set in 2070. Again, it's a near future setting, a touch of reality in what's otherwise a peculiar fantasy. There's no attempt to explain Zaroff's suicidal plot other than him being a mad scientist.

In fact, for all script editor Gerry Davis had recruited ophthalmologist Dr Kit Pedler as a scientific adviser on Doctor Who for this run of stories, surely The War Machines, The Tenth Planet and this one show an inherent technophobia, with science something dehumanising and to be feared.

There's another disguise for the Doctor in episode 2. In episode 3 the Doctor describes himself as "A man. Almost 5' 9", black coat, baggy trousers and a bowtie."

When Zaroff falls ill, Polly is again (instinctively) trusting, as is the Doctor. It's Jamie who thinks (correctly) that Zaroff is faking.

In episode 4, Ben calls the Doctor (jokingly) a "berk" and says, "He ain't normal, is he?" But note his dismissal at the end: "Zaroff, 'oo cares about him?" He was haunted by having to kill a Cybermen, so has he changed as a result of his subsequent experience, especially with the Daleks? Or is he simply prioritising, and is more worried about Jamie and Polly?

Jamie calls Ben "Benjamin" and feels safe inside the TARDIS - a set up for a gag as the Doctor loses control. The Doctor says he's never previously wanted to take the TARDIS anywhere in particular, but the strong suggestion here is that he can control the ship. (As we learn, they're only sent off course because of the Gravitron.)

The Moonbase

Groovy space gear

The first episode of this is a keenly felt loss. How I'd love to see the Doctor and his friends in spacesuits bounding across the surface of the Moon.

Ben knows there are 200 million miles from Mars to the Moon (in fact, the distance changes as both bodies orbit the Sun at different rates, but the average distance is about 240 million miles, so he's pretty much correct). He also seems to know about radiation - in episode 3 he says the temperature inside the Gravitron's thermonuclear powerpack "is about 4 million degrees."

Ben teases Polly for being a nurse - though she's looked after him twice when he's been knocked unconscious.

In episode 2, Polly recognises the Cybermen even though they look different - again, she's instinctive. In episode 3, the Cybermen recognise the Doctor despite his change in appearance (they might remember him from forthcoming stories The Wheel in Space and/or The Invasion, which take place before the events of this story).

The Doctor says he took some kind of medical degree in Glasgow under Lister in 1888. He certainly knows how to use a pathology lab. Does that mean he knows Madame Vastra? It's 1888 when we meet her in A Good Man Goes to War (2011), so perhaps it's the Second Doctor who rescues her.

It's fun when Hobson talks about the Cybermen: rarely for Doctor Who (at least until it came back in 2005), do events of previous stories become part of Earth history. They are quickly forgotten.

Note also that it's another multicultural, multiracial future. How outlandish would it have looked at the time that everyone in space is wearing tee-shirts? Speaking of which, this is the story where Jamie wears a polo-neck for the first time - which he'll continue to do for much of his time in the series. Is that, then, futuristic clothing?

The Doctor's conversation with himself in episode 3 is interesting: it seems as if we're hearing his inner thoughts, which is another breach of what we'd now think of as a "rule" of Doctor Who.

In the 1990s, a clip of the Doctor asking Polly to make coffee while he tries to puzzle out the mystery was used on documentaries to illustrate the sexism in the series. Yet in context I don't think that's fair. For one thing, both Ben and Polly are trying to be useful. Ben is asked to tidy up, which he clearly thinks is demeaning, and then gets in everyone's way. Polly is happy to help, and her coffee is what leads the Doctor to his revelation about how the Moonbase crew are being infected. Her positive attitude leads to the solution.

What's more Polly is again the one to come up with a way to stop the Cybermen, taking Jamie's suggestion of "holy water" and suggesting nail varnish remover instead. It's nicely worked out between the three companions. Polly isn't sure it will work and says, "I'm gonna try an experiment" - so Ben calls her "Professor". He's the one that knows nail varnish remover is made of acetone (Polly doesn't know that). He's the one who reworks the fire extinguishers for the "Polly cocktail" they're making. At least in the animation of the missing episode on the DVD, it's Polly who takes out the Cybermen.

But something's about to change. On the making-of documentary on the DVD, Frazer Hines (who plays Jamie) says The Moonbase was the final story not to have been written directly for him, that up till this point in the series he was largely taking lines from Ben and Polly or being left unconscious. He says things changed with the next story - but, as we'll see, I think that was at the cost of Ben and Polly

Actors Michael Craze and Anneke Wills only had six weeks left on their contracts at this point, which were not renewed. The same production team who created Ben and Polly and wrote such dynamic, fun stuff for them seem to have decided not to keep them on, and it's as if they then lose interest.

The Macra Terror

Waaah!

There's some fun stuff early on as Polly goes for a shampoo and Jamie resists but is flattered by the attention. We learn Ben has been in the Mediterranean - another rare bit of detail about his life before The War Machines. The three companions wear uniforms, and Polly says Jamie looks "super".

Ben is hypnotised so that he looks forward to work, the suggestion being that he usually drags his feet, and a reminder of the gloomy soul we met in his first story. In fact, I think he's changed a lot since then.

Polly is horrified by Ben's betrayal, and there's some interesting conflict about how much he's been taken over: he redeems himself by offering to let Polly escape from the Macra, then denies he did so to his masters. Later, the Doctor picks up on that: "I always knew you were a tough customer." It's a reminder of what Polly said in The Power of the Daleks about Ben being a "real man", though that's not something we often see.

Jamie refers to his friends as a "lassie and an old man". Just as the Doctor had a defining speech in The Moonbase about evil needing to be fought, here he declares that "bad laws were meant to be broken." It's a new dynamism: the Doctor as an active participant hero.

Polly becomes a miner, working with the men, but when the Macra attack she's a lot more screamy than she's ever been before. I suppose there's an argument that that's a fair response to the continuing stress of all she's been through since meeting the Doctor. But I think she's written here as a more generic and less interesting character.

There's fun in episode 4 when Jamie is required to do a "gay and cheerful dance" - again which we can't see because the episode is missing. At the end of the story a dance festival will be held every year in the Doctor's memory - and he gets a majorette's hat. He and his friends dance their way out and away to the TARDIS, which would be fun to see. It's nice to finish a story with them enjoying themselves for a change.

The Faceless Ones

Bye bye!

This story does not follow on directly from the end of the last one - the only Ben and Polly story not to do so, so the only one with a clear gap into which Big Finish or anyone else might insert new stories. Note, too, that Polly's hair has really grown since The Macra Terror, suggesting a lot of time has passed.

It's great that episode 1 exists to watch after so many missing episodes, and what sights it offers. The location filming at Gatwick is properly thrilling - bold and contemporary and real. It still feels relevant - taking the ordinariness of cheap flights and making it weird and scary.

Polly is so upset about the dead man they discover (despite all the death she's witnessed on her adventures) that Jamie hugs her. Is that out of character, or a symptom of her exhaustion?

The Doctor again has his magnifying glass, and his shuffling, bow-legged walk is so comic - and distinctive. It's not an original thought, but how much do we miss from these stories by not being able to see what he's doing?

Just as Ben was hypnotised in the last story, Polly is hypnotised in this one. No one mentions that fact (perhaps because The Macra Terror was for them a long time ago).

Jamie says "kiddin' on", "lassie" and "greet". He steals Samantha's ticket by kissing her. On the plane at the end of episode 4, he runs off to be sick - and that's consistent with his earlier fear of planes as "flying beasties". But we soon learn he's being smart, using the "sickness" to hide and so find out what's really going on. Again, he's intelligent if ignorant. Yet whereas he spotted Zaroff faking his illness, here he's surprised by the double of his friend Crossland.

Samantha Briggs refers to the brainwashed Polly as a "stuck-up thing", and it seems especially unfair that that isn't corrected - this being effectively Polly's last episode (because she and Ben only appear briefly at the end of episode 6, in pre-recorded scenes). Would Polly and Samantha have got on? I crave more adventures with Samantha as a companion, and love her response on seeing the real Pinto: "Flippin 'eck!"

She rocks it -
Sherlock's mum in episode 4

I wouldn't mind Wanda Ventham's Jean Rock as a companion, either. Perhaps there's a spin-off series of strange alien murder mysteries for Rock and Briggs to solve.

Though we don't see Ben and Polly for most of the rest of the story, they're often mentioned - and the Doctor insists in episode 4 (without any evidence) that they're still alive. It's odd to think of those episodes being recorded, and Patrick Troughton insisting that we'll see his friends again while knowing they've already left the series.

It shows how well established Jamie is that when he appears as a Chameleon in episode 6 and has lost his Scottish accent, it is really creepy.

Blade shoots Chameleon Janice, and there's a notable lack of judgment from the Doctor about all the humans and Chameleons killed in this story. Also, does Blade's original stay behind for the bargain to work?

And then we're back to Gatwick, where Ben and Polly realise that it's the same day on which they met the Doctor in The War Machines.

Just as with Jackie Lane as Dodo, Michael Craze and Anneke Wills left the series midway through a story, but it's nice that this time there's a prerecorded sequence so they can goodbye at the end. It still feels a bit abrupt and brutal - they've been missing for four episodes and then we just have time to wave them off.

Polly wants to stay in London "a bit", rather than leave the TARDIS. Ben says of being back home that, "it's good to feel normal" - chiming with what he said about the Doctor in The Underwater Menace. The Doctor rather makes the decision for them, saying they're lucky to get back to their own world.

Which is odd since he's the reason they left their world in the first place, and because the strong suggestion in The Underwater Menace is that he can control the TARDIS if he wants to. So is he lying so that they don't feel bad about leaving him?

The Doctor tells Polly to look after Ben, and off they go. What became of them? (A long time ago, I tried to address how Polly might have struggled to return to ordinary life in a short story.)

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Jamie are plunged straight into their next adventure. There are few gaps between the stories for the next year...

Doctor Who: 1978

After episode 491 (The Stones of Blood, part 4)
22 November 1978
<< back to 1977

Frank Bough interviews Tom Baker
Nationwide, BBC1, 22 November 1978

In the early evening of 22 November 1978, the BBC's live news magazine Nationwide (basically, The One Show but without the view out the window) celebrated the 15th birthday of Doctor Who. It was, in the best traditions of a show about a rackety time machine, a day early.

Nationwide spoke first to the show's original producer, Verity Lambert, and then to actress Carole Ann Ford, who'd played the Doctor's first companion (and granddaughter), Susan. Then presenter Frank Bough spoke to Mary Tamm - the Doctor's current companion, Romana. Finally, he turned to Tom Baker, who sat brooding beside him.

What happens next is fascinating. You can watch it as an extra on The Stones of Blood DVD or, ahem, on YouTube. Tom seems in a garrulous mood, or bored, and his answers brusque, even combative.

Frank:
Of course, you are Doctor Who aren't you?

Tom:
Well, yes I am. I am.

Frank:
I mean, all the time - aren't you?

Tom:
Well, I mean I'm not as benevolent as... Doctor Who is not really an acting part but I mean I'm not as benevolent as the character and as kind as the character and even-tempered as the character. But yes, it's just me. That's all I suppose.

Frank:
But you have to be Doctor Who all the time, I'm told. People regard you totally where they see you as Doctor Who and nothing else. Do you see that?

Tom:
Well I don't have to be Doctor Who any more than you have to be Frank Bough!

Frank:
Yes, but I am Frank Bough!

Tom:
Yeah, I know you are. I'm Doctor Who because I only have a fictional image.

Frank:
But I don't have a fictional image. I am me.

Tom:
Of course you do. People don't really believe you exist. They only see you on the television. I mean, I see you at cricket games and things like that. But it's true, people have a televisual impression of you as they have of me. In my case, of course, I play a heroic figure whereas you're associated with rather terrifying -

Frank:
They want to talk to me about sport but they want to regard you as Doctor Who. Now, can't you stop being Doctor Who and become Tom Baker occasionally?

Tom:
Well, of course I can. I do that at home or I do it in the bar with Mary Tamm or somebody like that. But the point is when I meet anybody who's interested in Doctor Who there's no point in presenting Tom Baker because they find Tom Baker very dreary.

Frank:
Tell me a bit about how people regard you and the effect you have on the audience, who are convinced you are Doctor Who. What sort of way do people behave when they see you?

Tom:
Well, I mean mostly the reaction is one of cheerfulness and happiness because they associate me with the children being vastly amused by me or interested in what I do as the character of the Doctor. And they also ascribe to me - such is the gullibility of the public and the potency of television – they ascribe to me all the virtues of Doctor Who. For example, I don't need anything boring like a bank card, for example. I don't even need money now because people make the assumption because I play this benevolent fictional character that I am, you know, that my probity is totally beyond question.

Frank:
So you have to work very hard – if you're not very nice as Tom Baker then you have to be very nice as Doctor Who when the occasion demands it.

Tom:
Ah ha! Yeah, it's not difficult. I get on all right with people – superficially.

Bough failing to appreciate the difference between his real self and his televisual image would ultimately cost him his career. Wikipedia quotes Paul Connew, formerly of The News of the World, saying that the 1988 sex and drugs scandal,

"caused a sensation at the time, given Bough's public image as the squeaky clean frontman of breakfast and sports television."

It's fascinating to see Tom address the power that television gives him over members of the public in the light of the awful revelations about other TV stars of the time. Television was much more influential back then - with fewer channels, fewer alternatives to telly, and bigger, less media savvy audiences. Tom clearly saw the impact of that influence in his daily dealings with the public - and he took his responsibilities to them seriously.

He was certainly no angel - his autobiography is candid about booze and sex and being difficult on set - and yet he tried not to let children see him with a cigarette or beer, or being ordinary and dreary. Even when adults spotted "the Doctor", he tried not to disappoint them by merely being himself. It's striking that Bough seems amazed he'd make that effort.

Playing the Doctor is more than just an acting job, it also involves a public-facing role: you're expected to charm and entertain children off-screen as well as on, there are conventions, signings, charity things. Even years after you leave the role, it's the first thing people will mention. There are all the many people who, thrilled by your adventures, feel kinship, ownership, entitlement (look at how I blithely refer to my childhood hero as "Tom", when I've met him fleetingly a handful of times...).

Is it different from other leading roles? I suspect the presenters and stars of children's TV are the ones most likely to cause offence by not appearing as they seem on screen. But I'd love to know from David Tennant, for example, how much his dad's job as Moderator of the Church of Scotland, served as a model for how to conduct himself as the Doctor. Tom, after all, was once a monk...

Next episode: 1979

The end of analogue

Goodbye to all that

A spectacularly nerdy post, this. But of marginal interest to archaeologists of the future...

When I bought my flat in 2005, my parents decided it was probably time that I stopped using my old bedroom at their house as a store for my old sci-fi rubbish. One afternoon, my dad drove up with lots and lots of books and two bin bags full of videos. Ah, I can still remember the delighted look on the Dr's face...

(It was not a delighted look on the Doctor's face.)

For readers born after the Flood, video was a slower, chunkier versions of DVD, with a more gravelly image and no special features. (Well, some of the later ones and very brief ones, or came with a separate video providing a commentary track.)

My collection of videos sat in my attic, building up an impressive collection of dust and dead spiders, for the five years I lived in that flat. I gave some away when I could find someone who wanted them. But when we moved home last year, I still had a whole binbag of tapes and nothing to watch any of them on.

I'd looked into selling the tapes, or sending them to people who asked for them, but the hassle of actually packing the damn things kept meaning I never quite got round to it. Videos are heavy, so any kind of postage was going to be stupidly expensive.

But on Sunday, a nice man from the local RSPCA shop came round and took the lot. Having also posted back a tape I borrowed from Ian Potter an aeon ago (with no actual way of watching it), as of Monday - and for the first time since 1984 - I live in a home without videotape.

Yes, I know it's not exactly the most exciting watershed moment in all history, but once the tapes had been taken I must have looked suitably forlorn 'cos the Dr gave me a hug.

(If you want them, the videos will be in the new RSPCA shop opening next month at 267 Lower Addiscombe Road, Croydon, CR0 6RD.)

Tales from the TARDIS

Out in shops now is Ace Adventures DVD box, with two Doctor Who stories featuring the Seventh Doctor and his friend Ace. Among the jam-packed jamboree of extras, there's The Doctor's Strange Love, in which me, Joseph Lidster and Josie Long rabbit on about what we like about the first of Ace's stories, Dragonfire. Thrillingly, we got to shoot it out in time and space...

Me, Josie Long and Joe Lidster in the TARDIS.

The photo Joe took.

"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning..."

"What are you young people doing in my TARDIS?"

Whacky Lidster, thumbs aloft.

Our "Radio Times" shot.

Gillane and James, who made our wish come true. Plus my knee.

I look really bald in this one.

Podcasts

Three podcasts on which I witter:

Bad Wilf
Me and Joseph Lidster on writing, recorded 5 March 2011.

Radio Free Skaro
Me and brother/boss Tom Guerrier discussing our Doctor Who DVD documentaries in January.

Adventures in Time and Space and Music
I rabbit on about stuff, including music in Doctor Who, while a bit jet-lagged in Chicago last November.

MAD... literally MAD...

Out in all good DVD shops now is the 1971 Doctor Who story The Mutants, which features another documentary by me and the brother. Here is a clip because you are good:



It's also been announced that I've written another adventure for the Second Doctor Who, The Memory Cheats, starring Wendy Padbury as Doctor Who's friend Zoe.

And I've written an episode of the new series of Dark Shadows, based on the spooky US TV show. My story, The Creeping Fog, is out in June.

One and two

Those splendid fellows at Big Finish have announced more Doctor Who stuff what I wrote. "The Guardian of the Solar System" is my third go at writing for Sara Kingdom, as played by the amazing Jean Marsh. It's a never-before-told adventure of the First Doctor - or, as the youths on LiveJournal know him, One.

(I am also absolutely thrilled by the news that Andrew Smith is writing a Companion Chronicle, too. Smith wrote Full Circle (1980) - one of my favourite Doctor Whos, and my earliest memory of anything ever. Can. Not. Wait.)

Speaking of One, I've also got the newly released DVD of The Chase, which features some entirely delicious extra documentaries and ting that are a joy to behold. Well, all but the staring, over-earnest fanboy who should learn to sit up straight. Was thrilled to be there at the filming as William Russell read the extract from my book, The Time Travellers.

I have also written for the Doctor the youths know as Two. On the Big Finish Facebook group - now packed with exclusive goodies - you can also see the glorious artwork for The Second Doctor Box Set, featuring "Prison in Space" by Dick Sharples and adapted for audio by me. (Small version of the artwork, right.)

As well as Facebook, those on Twitter can follow Big Finish and the DVDs of old-skool Doctor Who.

This week has mostly been about the number 2. I did two days reporting, filled out two applications, wrote two comic strips and am currently into the second of two lots of rewrites. Last night, allowed a brief fall off the wagon, I was in two pubs. Now back to the wurk...

Chased

The Doctor Who Restoration Team have announced the contents of the forthcoming DVD of 1965 stories The Space Museum and The Chase, which includes details of the extras, including:

"Last Stop White City (dur. 13' 15") - School teachers Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton were the first people from Earth to travel with the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan in their time and space vehicle, the TARDIS. From their first step into the TARDIS in 'An Unearthly Child' to their departure at the end of 'The Chase', the duo were involved in sixteen thrilling adventures that captured the imagination of a generation. This documentary tells their story. With actors William Russell, director Richard Martin, studio vision mixer Clive Doig and writer Simon Guerrier."

The DVD is out in the UK in March. I've got a few more credits to come on Doctor Who DVDs - for example, as the boss Tweeted today:

"Noel Clarke (@NoelClarke) signed up to narrate challenging doc. Likely release date early 2011. Produced by Guerrier Bros."

I've also received my special edition DVD of Girl Number 9, featuring some particularly good not-walking-into-anything acting from me.

In the mean time, I'm pitching every which way, have a thing to finish by Sunday and got odd bits of work and training cropping up. Shower is still out - will post some pictures sometime - so I've been much better at going to the gym, since then at least I can wash. And I've also got a great long post to write about Something Important, but that will have to wait until next week.

Wet wet wet

A practical post today. Yesterday, my Daewoo DH-6100P HDD/DVD recorder would not eject a disc. It would try to play the thing but get caught up in a weird loop of cogitation. I tried restarting the machine but that only meant it came on again thinking, "Ooh, a disc" and hit the loop before getting to the stage where it would let me eject. What a clever bit of design.

Googling, Jimlad on AvForums had had the same problem, and I dared to follow his method of taking the bastard thing apart. A little to my amazement, that proved easy enough and the thing is now working. The Dr got to watch the end of Season One of Poldark and of Being Human before the latter's 2.1. Hooray!

I am always in frustrated awe of those who can actually make and fix things. And it's even more enraging when people who can do things don't.

Some 18 months ago, I spent about more than a month and a lot of money getting my bathroom fixed so it wouldn't leak on the people downstairs. It didn't work, and last September we were dribbling again. The Man - my sister's handy significant other - poked about a bit, muttered about cowboys and made a temporary fix.

Today he was back again to do things more finally. We thought we'd remove a couple of rows of tiles, let the dampness dry out over the next few days (we'll be using washing facilities at the gym and a mate's house), then reseal it all double-strength.

Only it never proves that simple. Anything we probe in this house reveals amazing corners cut - as we discovered weeks into living here with our boiler. The tiles round the shower turn out to have been fixed to a painted wall. The paint appears glossy and plastic, so water will run off it, but that also means its like the tiles have been fixed to glass. You put your finger under one tile, and the whole wall comes away.


Water has wormed its way through to this slick patch, and leaked right through the plasterboard into the wall behind. This means an interior wall with damp, which is something of a bad thing. We'll set heaters on the wet bits and try and get it sorted. We'll also need more tiles.


And, just to add to the joys, on the adjacent wall, the bottom tiles came off to reveal a dark hole. The shower mechanism and pipes turns out to be hidden behind a false wall that loses us maybe four or five inches of bathroom - enough extra space to allow us to fit a bath, though we can't afford anything nearly so fancy. It's all tided up now - the Man is very good - but I find even sat here in the next room tapping away that the darkness is looming.

Red eye, yellow eye

It’s all been a bit hectic here, but the two mountains of work are in (I just need to finish an index – something I’ve not written before). Was up till 2 am Wednesday getting through a draft of something, but I’m really rather pleased with how it’s come out. Announcements in due course.

But cor, blimey I am tired. Taking the weekend off to go to a party in Cardiff.

And then yesterday I spent the afternoon in A&E waiting to have my eye looked at. Something got into my left eyeball on Wednesday, and no amount of blinking, blubbing or washing would shift it. Knackered by all the typing, it meant I then couldn’t sleep. And yesterday my eye was all bloodshot.

So I sat in a hot, noisy hospital waiting room, hoping I wouldn’t miss the shout of my name. Read my way through some very exciting paperwork relating to a possible new bit of work, and then 50 pages of China Mieville’s new book, The City and The City.

Only half-way through but it’s an extraordinary book. A police procedural set in eastern Europe in two co-existing cities. Think the two spaceships blended together in the Doctor Who story Nightmare on Eden, only without the Muppets. Only citizens in either city must not notice their counterparts on fear of invoking Breach.

Mieville’s writing is punchy and vivid, making this mad idea chillingly real. It also reads like it’s a translation, and all kinds of little details – the proximity of Budapest, mentions of films and books, the bafflement of visiting Canadians – helps give it a ring of truth. The Wire as written by Borges, so far.

(I must get round to writing up notes on other good recent reads: gobsmack-o-wowed by David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, loved the first two-thirds of Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s Arabesk trilogy, and, despite reservations about the terrible jokes, John O’Farrell’s Utterly Impartial History of Britain is fun, too.

And speaking of recommendations, have loved the first season of 30 Rock and am slowly getting through the first season of the Twilight Zone, the Up series and The Monocled Mutineer.)

Anyway. Eventually a nice doctor prodded and poked my eye, using brown-orange dye to spot the problem. Think it’s sorted now, though it isn’t half still blinking sore. And I spent the rest of yesterday looking like half of me was off to a disco.

Plenty of typing still awaits my attention the far side of Cardiff, so might not be here all that much.

Oh, and hooray for the BBC Archive, who have been loading up yet more goodies in the last few weeks. Today they’re marking the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon with a whole load of marvellous moon porn, including some exclusive interviews with three Apollo astronauts.

Research gig

Simon's Holub has posted up his lovely, lovely artwork for my July Doctor Who audio, The Drowned World.

Out this week is the Doctor Who DVD The Cybermen Collection, which includes on disc 2 a half-hour documentary, Best Cybermen Moments. Written and presented by Matthew Sweet, directed and edited by Thomas Guerrier, it also sports some important research genius from me - and is my first proper, formal credit in such a capacity. Woo!

Tom and Matthew have worked wonders. And there's already a glowing review:

"It's very good indeed ... Far from being new-series centric, it's a near-full overview with lots of lovely, intelligently chosen clips from classic stories, and even a brief reading from a novelisation to kick things off .... It lacks other talking heads, but where it scores most is in Sweet taking a thematic approach to discussing the Cybermen critically, rather than a story-by-story approach. Sweet is respectful and irreverent in equal measure, an entertaining host ... I'm not saying it's necessarily full of revelations for die-hards, but it's as good as the better extras on the classic Who range..."

Cliff Chapman, Doctor Who: The Cyberman Collection DVD review, Den of Geek.

The same site has some very nice things to say about my Judgement of Isskar, reviewed by Stephen Bray an episode at a time: episode one; episode two; episode three; episode four.

An Englishman gone wrong

Alistair Cooke was born in 1908, the same year as Ian Fleming and William Hartnell. These days, all three seem to have been from another world, one all cigarette smoke, bad dentistry and crackling black-and-white. And yet, watching Cooke’s 1972 TV series America: A Personal History of the United States I’m struck by how the past explains the world we live in now, and what hard-learnt lessons we seem to have forgotten. It seems especially pertinent this week, with America bounding bright-eyed into a new era on this coming Tuesday.

The 13-part TV series is from the same stable as landmark BBC series Civilisation and The Ascent of Man. It's an effective use of the small number of colour TV cameras; like the landmarks shows today that show off high definition. Cooke had already spent 40 years explaining the States to the Brits. The BBC radio programme Letter From America (so much good stuff on that site) ran from March 1946 to 20 February, 2004 – there’s a deluxe hardback of the best of his letters, and various other collections, but the whole damn lot is going to be put online by the University of East Anglia. Hooray!

So this is an ex-pat’s view of his adopted home. The first episode covers Cooke’s own passion for the country, the places he visited when he first arrived, the music and vibe that so wowed him. There’s no doubt he’s got it bad… And that flavours a lot of what follows.

The next eleven episodes tell the history of the country. Though Cooke starts with the first people to arrive from the East, things really get going with the arrival of Chris Columbus and then the empires of Spain and France. Episode three is about the British taking charge of their territory, and the first clamour for independence.

Cooke then follows the efforts of these nascent Americans to achieve in practice the promise of their famous declaration: the self-evident equality of all men, the life and liberty and happiness. Note it is “happiness” not “profit”; much of Cooke’s story of America is about inequality, success and enrichment at the expense of others.

Cooke admits his love for the Supreme Court as – more often than not – the defender of the little guy and thus of the American dream, that anyone can make it so long as they’re prepared to work. Cooke’s villains are those who ignore the Supreme Court, his crises when they get a decision wrong. The nation we know today, Cooke argues, is the product of the Supreme Court having to intercede: “No, this is what America is...”

The American system of checks and balances is interesting because, I’d argue, it looks backward. Everything is referred to the original, 18th century constitution and its 27 amendments. (Cooke covers the first 10 tweaks (the “Bill of Rights”) in some detail, but then rather speaks of the constitution as unchangeable monolith.)

For example, Americans today have the right to bear arms because of lines written by James Madison in 1789 and ratified by three quarters of the 14 then-existent States on 15 December 1791. Imagine our own gun laws being based on people’s habits in the year that Mozart died and Charles Babbage born; so many of our assumptions about the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness have completely changed since then.

As Cooke later argues in the penultimate episode of the series, the Second Amendment sought to prevent the US having its own standing army. The newly independent Americans feared creating a tyrant of their own, one with soldiers to back him up. But, at risk from pirates and Indians and each other, early Americans had to be ready to defend their homes at a minute’s notice. Now they have a standing army – and police force and everything else – haven’t they lost that excuse?

There are those who want a Bill of Rights for the UK, who argue we should have a written constitution like the US. But we have a written constitution; it’s just all of it – every act of law, and the precedent of every decision in a court room. (Madison himself was against a Bill of Rights for that reason and some others.) Ours is a constantly developing system of prohibitions: you’re free to do anything that’s not specifically banned or limited.

One of my history teachers argued that ours is, at least in principle, a much freer system. My understanding is that the reason we have so many laws and amendments is because of people (not always intentionally) abusing loopholes in the law – or wanting some prohibition relaxed. The latter is interesting for reasons I’ll come back to. But as Madison observed, if we only behaved better we’d not need a Government watching us.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

James Madison, The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments, The Federalist #51, 6 February 1788.

A few articles on Cooke I've read criticise him for not really proving the darker side of the US, for being such an establishment yes-man. I think that's most telling when he talks about segregation. When Cooke arrived in the US, he says, he found the racial divide very difficult. He argues – I think not very convincingly – that his winces were no different to his American friends wincing at British “norms” such as sending young kids to boarding school.

Yet episode six, “Gone West”, is unflinching in its horror at the treatment of the native Americans, and episode seven, “A Firebell in the Night” concisely explains the issues of slavery, the Civil War and its legacy today.

It's true he doesn't really explore the racial clashes of the post-war period, and he glosses over the assassinations of both Kennedys despite having been in the room in 1968.

“There was a head on the floor, streaming blood and somebody put a Kennedy boater under it and the blood trickled down like chocolate sauce on an ice cake. There were flash lights by now and the button eyes of Ethel Kennedy turned to cinders. She was slapping a young man and he was saying "Listen lady, I'm hurt too" - and down on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child, lying on a cathedral tomb.”

Alistair Cooke, Letter from America, 9 June 1968.

But this series isn't about what is wrong with America, but how often it has been right, and how its national character has been hard won. There's the adversity of the early settlements and trails, the need for Nietzschean will against the enormous odds. This creates the myth of the American dream of triumph through effort.

This story is brought alive by footage of the places as they are now, by contemporary paintings, sketches, architecture, graffiti. Yet it's hearing the songs of wagon trains and revolution that really bring the story alive.

Then when nature is conquered, it is man-made adversity that must be battled: the astonishing violence of the Wild West. We lose the folk songs in favour of brutal photographs of doubled-up families, living on next to nothing.

Innovations slowly make life better: a steel plough to get through the unrelenting ground, barbed wire to make the cowboys into rangers, the mail-order catalogue to allow even the furthest flung family to get the latest clothes and haircuts. Cooke doesn't say it explicitly, but I felt he was implying that the American people became just as domesticated as their animals.

I'm also a little hesitant about some of the stories Cooke relates – they might have lost him 20 points on QI. There's Sacajawea, the native guide who Cooke relates throwing herself in front of her brother to save Lewis and Clark. Isn't that the same story as Pocahontas? Cooke tells us the Sacajawea lived to be 90 and to bitterly regret how her people had been forcibly dispossessed. This again seems to be disputed.

That dispossession is one of Cooke's examples of the Supreme Court being over-ruled by a villain. When President Andrew Jackson ignores Worcester vs. Georgia, Cooke calls him “imperious”. In fact, the story of America is one of empire: of conquest by France and Spain and then Britain, of 13 states then conquering the West.

Yet at the same time it's an empire of incredible, radical liberalism and tolerance. In many ways America sees itself less as a imperial conqueror as a haven for the world's bullied and oppressed. (Perhaps there's an argument that the US, and Israel, are victims of a cycle of abuse: the bullied growing up to be bullies...)

Cooke explains the astonishment of Jews in the nineteenth century on being able to practice their religion freely. (Until recently, only one race or religion had a word meaning their persecution specifically – pogrom – a signpost of centuries of oppression. Since the 1980s, but especially since 11 September 2001, there's also been islamophobia.)

It wasn't just pogroms that caused the huge emigration to America in the nineteenth century. There were the failed revolutions of 1848, the potato famine in Ireland, the stories of American streets lined with gold that dated back to the time of Cortez.

Cooke visits Ellis Island, at the time of filming derelict and recently gutted by fire, what Cooke calls,

“A frowsy monument to the American habit when something wears out of junking and forgetting it.”

He retells the experience of the immigrants, a route visitors can walk themselves today as Ellis Island is a museum. The Dr and I visited on our honeymoon in 2004, stunned that two out of every 10 who’d made the vast trek across the planet to get into this place were sent home – for looking sick or old or useless. US immigration still barks harder than any other sentry post I’ve been through.

What the museum doesn't show is the experience of immigrants once they've succeeded in reaching the mainland. Cooke visits the offices of the Jewish Daily Forward, which has run since 1897 and had a peak circulation of 250,000. Its letters pages speak volumes about the migrant experience: the struggles to learn English, to retain their old identities and religions, to fit in with the locals. Cooke marvels at the Daily Forward still being printed in Yiddish; I found it more strange and alien to see it laid out in chunks of movable type.

The different migrant communities shared the same problems if not the same culture and language. Cooke neatly explains how this shared experience led to a uniquely American style of comedy, the burlesque. He waves an actual slap-stick, explaining that the jokes were all corrupt cops and landlords, lascivious judges, the risks and suffering of the young as they try to make good the promise of their parents. From this shared sense of the little man surviving on his wits, Cooke says, come Keaton and Groucho and WC Fields.

The immigrants also meant cheap labour – and produced a few very rich individuals. Cooke ignores the presidents between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt because he doesn't think they actually held any power. Instead it was the business interests that ran the country and dictate policy – an accusation still levelled today.

Roosevelt gunned for the industrialists, but also wanted the immigrants to sign up to a distinct, indivisible American identity, distinct from their mother countries. I'd always been a little spooked by in-your-face American patriotism – the oath of allegiance in schools and public meetings, the heavy presence of the stars and stripes outside people's homes. Who, I thought, are they trying to convince, and of what? But Roosevelt's call for there to be no more “hyphenated Americans” suddenly puts that in context.

And the second generation of immigrants flourished in their new home. Cooke sorts through the index cards, finding the parents of Irving Berlin and Alfonse Capone, sundry judges and political chieftains. He also makes the link between America's toleration and its success over other nations: the German Jewish physicists fleeing Hitler in the 1930s were to ultimately win America the Second World War.

(See also me on what the bloody foreigners have done for us.)

Cooke is fascinating on the Wall Street Crash of 1928, on the frippery and greed immediately before it and the lie it was built on. He describes the problem brilliantly as,

“A mountain of credit on a molehill of actual money”,

and explains that in those primitive days there was none of the regulation and scrutiny that would stop such a thing happening today (!). (It's also eerie seeing footage throughout the series of the New York skyline, with the World Trade Center still being built.)

Those who ignore history are damned to repeat it. It strikes me that those bankers and money men who've fought so hard to de-regulate the markets are little different from teenagers hosting a party while their parents are away. They don't want rules or conditions either. After all, what can possibly go wrong?

But what can history teach us on how to get out of the present financial mess? Well, new president Franklin Roosevelt brought in a strict regime of what Cooke calls “national socialism”, ending speculation with other people's money for a whole two years (until the Supreme Court over-ruled him). There were huge public works like the Hoover Dam – but Cooke acknowledges it wasn't this Stalinist programme that solved the problem, it was the outbreak of world war.

As detailed above, for its first 160 years, the US had a “dogged distrust” of a standing army. The standing army in 1941, says Cooke, was no larger than Sweden’s. There’s comic footage of what look like boy scouts scampering through the woods, which Cooke starkly contrasts with the vicious efficiency of German Blitzkrieg.

The war changed everything. Cooke rather sees it as the apotheosis of American will, American ingenuity, American tolerance for the Jews so badly treated everywhere else. America bails out the UK and liberates France and Germany, turning the tables on its mother countries. The hydrogen bomb secured its position over the whole world.

Between 1945 and 1953 America’s nuclear toys went unrivalled. This unique position maybe explains their incredible paranoia and witch hunts – though as Cooke says they might as well have tried to keep secret the laws of gravity. The American arsenal and war machine is vital to the US economy, Cooke seems to say, and vital to its modern identity.

The penultimate episode of the series, as Cooke visits the men on duty in a nuclear bunker, is utterly chilling. We watch the nerdy young men who can bring about the end of the world going about their routine. Cooke explains they wear pistols to shoot each other should they start to act strange. He hopes the systems will not become too coolly automated, that there might always be some key human component who’ll be able to have second thoughts…

The last episode seems to begin with a prologue from some years later – perhaps after Reagan has been elected. Cooke admits his predictions in 1972 have not all come to pass, and flavours what follows. He ties his history together, comparing the America of the early 1970s to the founding dreams and ideology of the late 18th century.

It’s fascinating; he’s sure the self-sufficient communes will be part of the future, that America will be living the Good Life, that cities will be left far behind. He shows footage of a young Jesse Jackson, and then tells us of his amazement that – so soon after such violence and deep-rooted segregation – there are now black mayors and senators.

I found Cooke discussing the race question while stood in Chicago deeply strange: he'd finished writing his letters in 2004 just too soon to have mentioned Barack Hussein Obama. I wonder what Cooke would have made of him.

It's a love-letter to a nation, and I found it compelling. The English, Cooke says, often think of Americans as “an Englishman gone wrong.” His series shows how wrong we are.

Value-added material (VAM)

Things that shouldn't be labelled "special features" on the back of a DVD:

interactive menu screens
How you spoil us with the ability to start and stop the DVD! And of course it's "interactive" - it's not a menu if you can't choose something from it.

chapter selection
Oooh! What next? You tantalise us with the prospect of a box and a sleeve and the shiny surface of the disc?

My Christmas DVDs, incidentally, were Alistair Cooke's America and Private Schultz, both of which I hope to blog about sometime. The Dr got the two-disc Princess Bride and Night of the Hunter.

And my previous DVD-buying methodology is the subject of Clemmo's despair.

Recent telly

A few pals speak of being at the “DVD boxset” stage in life. Some have kids, some can’t be fagged going out of an evening. I’m just a bit rubbish following telly as it airs. I either forget or something comes up in Real Life or I’m racing to meet a deadline.

The recent, needed lull in my writing commitments means I’m gulping down great swathes of the goggle box.

I've just got through the second series of The Wire – as leant by Codename and Mrs Moose. Having beaten the Barksdales last year, our gang of shades-of-grey cops are variously investigating the Baltimore docks, looking into murders and drugs and the union. The Barksdales are licking their wounds, either weathering prison or trying to restart their business. And slowly, very slowly, it’s all coming to a head…

As just about everyone on the planet has enthused, The Wire is a brilliant series. Funny and smart and rude and surprising, the serious, clever and violent adult stuff is nicely balanced with bits of slapstick and silliness, the stupid everyday things people say and do. If you’ve seen it you already know this; if you haven’t I don’t want to say more for fear of spoiling its wonders.

But I’d be quite happy were Idris Elba to be the next Doctor Who.

It’s not just box sets. I have also been watching telly LIVE. Little Dorrit is am impressively grimy, dirty adaptation – and the trailers keep suggesting a sapphic something involving Freema Agyeman. What is not to like?

Dickens is particularly good on the petty viciousness people heap on one another, the debilitating effect of gossip, the decades wasted on silly intrigues. The Dickensian world is a ruthless, brutal place, everyone on the brink of ruination. Yet because he populates his stories with such comic archetypes, it's very easy to over-play. Actors pull on frock coats and mad facial hair and prance about doing funny voices.

Far better is to play against the comedy, to pretend you're not comic characters at all. That way – as in the books – the comedy works to underline the awful things befalling the weakest characters. And that's why The Muppets' Christmas Carol is the best ever adaptation of Dickens.

Also, in Little Dorrit Andy Serkis plays another compelling grotesque. I'd like to see him play something heroic. In fact, I’d be quite happy were he the next Doctor Who.

The new series of Spooks unleashed two thrilling episodes this week, featuring Richard Armitage as a new character. The Dr was very pleased with the important plot point that he's got William Blake tattoos (and so had to take his top off).

For all it's good fun with lots of chasing, there were lots of silly things. If you're sneaking around someone's bedroom while they're asleep in bed, it's probably best to switch your mobile-phone-cloning machine to silent rather than letting it bing. And the Prime Minister would be committing political suicide if he cancelled Remembrance Sunday.

Armitage is looking pretty buff having spent eight years in a Russian prison. Also, his debrief seems to consist of being asked “Are you a double-agent?” - to which he answered “Yes”. He hangs round the office waiting for a cup of tea, and then is quickly part of the next mission. The writers should look at The Man With The Golden Gun (the book) for what happens when James Bond comes out of the cold...

Yes, I appreciate they sort of address some of that in episode two. But not really very much. Again they ask him if he's a double-agent, again he tells them yes. So they let him back on the mission again. Still, I wouldn't mind if Armitage was the next Doctor Who.

Incidentally, I also saw Mark Lawson talking to John le Carre with its top fact that the word le Carre invented for a “Russian asset” – mole – came from The Wind In The Willows.

And then there's Dead Set, in which zombies get into the Big-Brother. It's impressively violent and grisly, though the quick cutting means you're not always aware quite how grisly it is. The Dr missed one episode so I explained about Davina being stabbed through the back of the head, the lamp-pole bursting out of her eye... And realised it was far more horrid telling it than it had seemed on the screen.

It licked along quickly, never explaining how the zombies came to be or suggesting any solution. Horror can often be just a sequence of horrific events, bludgeoning against your eyeballs. But this managed to be smart and funny, keeping us guessing right up to the end.

Oh, and I’d be quite happy were Kevin Eldon the next Doctor Who.