Something nasty in 'Dr Who'
- Publication: The Scotsman
- Date: 1976-02-07
- Author: Stanley Eveling
- Page: 6
- Language: English
A MEAGRE week, a week for curling up in front of the tele vision set with a good book, if you can afford to buy one, that is. Thinking of books, I homed in on Melvyn Bragg's Sunday soiree, Read All About It, hoping for tips from the well-informed Jilly Cooper, Ian Norrie and Angela Carter, not to mention Sir Hugh Greene and V. S. Pritchett.
No dice. Melvyn is so far into being smooth that the wonder is he, does not slip out of the other side. Jilly, charming to see, shook her and pretty head mightily grinned really impishly, which
think is very nice but shouldn't be done quite so. often because it seems to have an awful effect on her brain. I have no memory of lane at all. Sir Hugh, now, is a huge grin of a person, merry from head to toe, a sort of very large, successful Billy Bunter of a man who, as you might expect, is editing a collection of stories about sleuths. So he grinned and grinned and was very jolly but, like the notorious cat, the more he did, the less he was. A strange sight, that. Even V.S.. normally an acute critic, was motoring in low gear.
I've left Angela to the last because she was an experience. Here was a soul honed to a fine point of hysterical con tempt timid and arrogant, outrageous and afraid, des pising everything in sight and being really tough-minded until It came to her turn when she
suddenly launched into a sort of metaphysical gush about a French book celebrating the voluptuousness of female submission. A lovely paradox this, since voluptuous submission is something that can only have been a literary experience for this awesome girl. Witness the way in which, speaking of the book by Knut Hamsun, she spat out the word "art" as if it were a bug lodged in her teeth. Where do they find them? A dire programme.
Everyone who is old enough to have seen John Hopkins's "Talking to a Stranger remembers it. It was like a troubled but objective gaze behind the fluttering curtains of suburbia. Perhaps he has suffered from the success of that outstanding piece. Certainly, his latest, A Story to Frighten the Children, does not survive the comparison. Not that it wasn't watchable. It had all the solid virtues of a good, steady "Z Cars" episode with slightly more of the squalid reality of life than the early showing of the latter could tolerate,
In the first five very dramatic minutes a girl is hunted down, raped and killed in a canyon of high-rise suburbia but after that things settled to a fairly routine piece about the police. Probe how you will nothing much emerges. Oh, there was some unconvincing stuff about the police and the right of the public to be protected, not from killers but from them, but there seemed little sense in the argument. Maybe there was even the suggestion that the rapist's violence, his driving sexual need, was not culpable but I doubt it. Really, I don't know why I mentioned the play at all. I suppose because it was written by Hopkins, writer who deserves respect. Once, his talent found its direction. It will again.
Not prone to give aid and comfort to the Whitehouse- Longford axis, I hesitate to insinuate a criticism of the Dr. Who series. Children, rightly, adore it and so do their parents. And the present Dr. scarf and all, is to my mind, the best yet. But it has to be said, a curiously adult tone has crept into recent episodes. Anxieties, tastes, hang-ups, have. insinuated themselves, sexuality has somehow begun to extend tendrils round the predicaments of the innocent Sarah. Monsters have started to stroke her pretty hair, a certain relish for the nauseating has begun to appear; the ugly, things that are brown and mutant, have hobbled in to make their headless bows.
It is as if an imagination that ought to be seeking its outlets into art elsewhere has been creeping into the innocence of the series, a monster itself, operating in shadow. In a recent episode, with its eternal painted girls guarding a flame and a Frankenstein medic trying to find a head for a brown, clawed trunk this feeling was there, trying to control itself through comedy. The latest concerns a sinister pod that has opened and penetrated a man who is being slowly greened into a walking cabbage. Daft as a brush, that's right, but there's something nasty going on here.
Two things were right about earlier series. One was that the humans remained human and the enemies were, by and. large, robotic clankers with aluminium fingers that spat lead or had bodies like tin cans and voices warped by electronics. They were one thing; we were another. Now the things are creeping into us and it won't do. And this suggests the further point that earlier episodes were candidly fictional, not happenings that could be observed without horror. Now there is a sort of conviction around, as if there were will to experience what is taking place as true. I hope I am wrong about this.
Pornography occurs when it is a necessary part of the experience that we should take it subjectively, as if it were really true, as if it were not art at all. Pornography is art used for the purposes of life, instead of life itself. Somehow I seem to detect, in recent episodes of this programme for children, an adult fantasy seeking satisfaction. Adult, keep out. The Glittering Prizes returned to something like form this week with the episode concentrating on the rise to fame of the gulping, wry, too self-conscious hero. And something has become clear, too. This is a story of loves and hates, of likes and dislikes, but what is odd is that the author cannot, for some reason, put his belief where his mouth is.
Adam Morris goes to interview a famous old fascist of the thirties. He means to pillory him but Raphael writes the part of the wicked old man such with overwhelming conviction that he can find. nothing for his hero to say in. return. All the author can do. by the way of rebuttal, is to represent the old fascist as being really off his head. But he isn't. To parody Marxist jargon, here is an author who is a subjective fascist and an abjective liberal. No wonder his hero needs the constant protection of humour. A weird divided piece this, brilliant and nasty, held back from some thing better by the divided self that produces it. Now watch on.
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- APA 6th ed.: Eveling, Stanley (1976-02-07). Something nasty in 'Dr Who'. The Scotsman p. 6.
- MLA 7th ed.: Eveling, Stanley. "Something nasty in 'Dr Who'." The Scotsman [add city] 1976-02-07, 6. Print.
- Chicago 15th ed.: Eveling, Stanley. "Something nasty in 'Dr Who'." The Scotsman, edition, sec., 1976-02-07
- Turabian: Eveling, Stanley. "Something nasty in 'Dr Who'." The Scotsman, 1976-02-07, section, 6 edition.
- Wikipedia (this article): <ref>{{cite news| title=Something nasty in 'Dr Who' | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Something_nasty_in_%27Dr_Who%27 | work=The Scotsman | pages=6 | date=1976-02-07 | via=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=24 April 2025 }}</ref>
- Wikipedia (this page): <ref>{{cite web | title=Something nasty in 'Dr Who' | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Something_nasty_in_%27Dr_Who%27 | work=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=24 April 2025}}</ref>
