MetaCatholic

Yesterday I offered you Jim Hacker’s guide to the British press. But one of the ways in which the press creates stories is the use of opinion polls (increasingly ones they commission. It’s surprising how many people will believe a poll, even when as in this one (which Jim West picked up on a German version of) so much basic information is missing. (How was the sample made up? Who commissioned it? How were the questions worded? What choices of answer did people have? Were the “Protestants” church-going or cultural? What was the age profile? … well, you get my point).

So, for all those who are tempted to believe the polls, here is Sir Humphrey Appleby’s guide to getting the answer you want.

It’s a bit out-of-date now but Yes Prime Minister provides a superb guide to the Press. It seems that in the international world of blogdom people are unnecessarily prone to believe what they read in it, and a judicious pinch of salt is in order.

If you are remotely interested in Dr Who, sound effects, dance or electronica, then check out this “illustrated” (I have no idea what the equivalent word should be for aural examples) story about Delia Derbyshire’s work for the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s.

Jim West points me to a ludicrously serious review of a pretty naff new BBC series. It seems that the pot has been stirred by (quelle surprise!) the Mail on Sunday , a paper for which Christian is often a secret code for “white British foaming-at-the-mouth bigot who is always angry about everything that has happened since the end of Empire”.

Okay, here’s my take, as someone who managed to watch that episode without any of the aforementioned reactions. It was rubbish, but mildly entertaining in a “watch me if you haven’t got anything better to do” kind of way. Then again, I quite enjoyed the palpable drivel of the Da Vinci Code, and this falls very much into Dan Brown territory.

The plot is based around the Knights Templar trying to smuggle the true cross to England for safety at the tie the Pope is breaking up their order. A fundamentalist and nationalist sect see this as the focus for a national politically framed religious revival. Archaeologists start to stumble on the story, and the bad guys must steal their research, and the fragment of the true cross they’ve found in their dig. The bad guys, one of whom is barking mad, wear Templar crosses on their white T-shirts, carry swords, and fantasise about being crusaders.

Okay, that plot is barking mad, but within the context of the insanity, and shoddy plotting, there’s nothing particularly strange about one of these nutters killing a moderate Muslim. It was a good dramatic moment, and watching it, I can’t say for a moment that the idea of a moderate Muslim struck me as so outrageous. Nor given the general laziness and shonkiness of the plot, did the idea of a fanatical Christian sect obsessed with the True Cross, and building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.

I can’t admit to any enthusiasm for watching subsequent episodes, but then this week I had better things to do. Even though I thought it crappy, I feel I must defend it from this kind of silly manufactured outrage that involves taking a piece of trash fiction as a serious political comment by those with a sense of humour bypass and a choleric disposition to cling to cultural Christianity.

Get a life, guys, and lighten up.

I don’t know. Here I am opining with great seriousness on those bits of life, the universe and everything on which I wish to opine, and what search term brings the visitors streaming in?

In the last twenty-four hours 131 searches landing here have been variants on “German Dalek”!

Listening to it the clip again, however, I was definitely right that those Daleks are very polite to their “inferiors”:

“Sie sind jetzt ein Gefangener der Daleks”

Exterminieren! Exterminieren! The delight of hearing this new Dalek war cry over the German countryside was followed a moment later by doubting that the oh-so-superior Dalek master race would “Sie” the human scum they’re about to obliterate.

In some ways it’s a paradigm for the whole episode, from unprecedented games with regeneration energy, through to a final return to the solar system where the moon has been loitering around until the earth is returned for it to orbit again. Provided you never stop to ask if it makes sense, Journey’s End was a wonderful climax to the fourth series, and a stonking thrill-a-minute ride of ingenuity and story telling vim. The apotheosis of Donna Noble as half-time Lord, half human, unravelling into the tragedy of Donna Noble, gossipy temp with nothing special about her, is one of the showcase tragedy moments of the series. The new Davros is as brilliantly mad as the old one ever was. The insane Dalek Caan is a brilliant piece of characterisation. And I could lengthen that list with other gems.

Yet, while I know that on one level, sci-fi doesn’t have to make sense within our limits, it would be nice if there was a greater sense of internal logic than loose-end tying. If the laws of physics are going to be broken, then an explanation within the logic of the fictional universe is generally needed, even if it is simply the superior technology of the Time Lords. The emotional power of reuniting old friends can’t quite compensate for over convenient dei ex machina. How exactly do Mickey and Jackie manage to materialise in exactly the right place to save Sarah Jane? And so on.

I enjoyed this episode tremendously, because it moved along fast enough not to ask any such questions. I think the ambiguity the story highlights of the Doctor’s morality always catching him up in so much violence underlines an ongoing question at the heart of the series. But I can’t help feeling that too much was too neat, and underneath there are more niggling questions that will be more apparent when watched again. As an experience, a five star roller-coaster. As a good story … hmm, I think my inner jury’s still out.

Mark Goodacre and Loren Rosson have been keeping up their respective Who reviews (revWhos?). In a post today Loren reveals his dislike for the character driven stories of new Who, over against the plot driven stories of classic Who. I think he’s wrong generally, because plots where you care about the characters are more exciting and involving than ones where you don’t. The effect, for example, of dwelling on the companions family and backstory is that one gains a far greater sense of the Doctor’s disruptiveness and danger, to set alongside the glamour of adventure.

Loren also decries the idea that new Who is of its age, instead of timelessly out of any fashion. I would argue that it was always influenced by and reflected the different trends of its day. The dry debunking of every “religious” mystery in favour of a fairly unspecified and rhetorical science by Pertwee’s Who (to say nothing of his Bondian fascination with gadgets and vehicles) was as much of its age as anything in new Who. Compare and contrast, for example, Pertwee’s Daemons with Tennant’s Satan Pit.

On the whole, new Who is all the better also for not being a serial. Clifffhangers have rarely worked well, then or now. The resolution of cliff-hanger in the next episode was almost always weak, and a feat of visual or narrative prestidigitation, and often induced a sense of disappointment. I don’t think they’ve improved with time. Silence in the Library ends brilliantly, but the start of Forest of the Dead is so disappointing it predisposes you to be disappointed with what follows.

In the end, one of the things I really like (that Loren doesn’t) is the sense of story arc. The episodes are held together mot by fairly crude links, but by hints and intimations of threat and danger that run through the whole. In one sense there is no cliffhanger at the end of Turn Left. The story has finished. But the palpable sense of threat that draws on themes running back to the first season, intimated throughout this season, spurs a far more urgent desire to know what happens next. It is not just our fear for the characters that is brought into play, but our desire for greater understanding of the story, and the resolution of puzzles. That is a far more teasing inducement to watch the next episode than any “what happens next” cliff-hanger.

Who has always been “crossover” TV. It started as a children’s series that appealed to adults. New Who is, I think, fundamentally an adult series with great child appeal.

Thank goodness Doctor Who is not an evangelical!

A warning: this post contains …

In the excellent two-parter Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead the Doctor hits the solution to a puzzle by reflecting on the English language. Donna Noble and 4022 people before her “have been saved”. But who, wonders the Doctor, talks like that. We might say someone is safe, but not that someone is saved. No … There’s a dead giveaway there: “saved” is computer speak. They’ve been virtualised onto the biggest hard-drive in the universe. But just think, if the Doctor had been an evangelical Christian, he’d never have thought it weird to say “Donna Noble has been saved.”

Given that this is a fairly major plot point, it seems like a fairly stark reminder that if Christians want to be understood, they should learn to speak the language as everyone else does. And maybe not sound quite so weird.

Possibly the best Doctor Who story of them all. It will depend on next week’s part two, and it’s rather hard to see how they can match this with an ending that will do justice to the menace and mystery.

I’d forgotten about this until some idle browsing reminded me. A few years back, this advert got banned from UK TV.

It was held to be offensive to the feelings of pregnant women and the bereaved. What’s interesting is that no-one seems to have objected to the message that we should “play more”. Instead they objected to the idea that “life is short” when it was portrayed so graphically (and, I think, humorously). Was this censored because the advert was offensive, or because reality is offensive?