The Idiot's Lantern

Chapter the 265th, where London police detain people who've committed no crime to protect the image of a coronation (could never happen in real life, of course).

Plot:

The Doctor and Rose travel to north London on the 1st June 1953, the day before the coronation of Elizabeth II. In a terrace street, they notice that too many households have TV aerials for the time, and then witness a police raid, where someone is forcibly removed from their home and bundled off in a car. They talk to a family living near to the raid, the Connollys. The family are clearly hiding something, and the Doctor and Rose sense that the mother and teenage son, Tommy, want to talk, so they distract the husband by attacking his values from the lofty vantage point of their more modern assumptions. Ha, ha, look they're gratuitously undermining what they know he holds dearest, and telling him he's named the UK flag wrong (he calls it a Union Jack, which Rose says he's not allowed to unless it's flown at sea, but actually she's incorrect). Anyway, it turns out people - including Tommy's Gran - have been rendered faceless and catatonic by forces unknown. The police arrive and cart Gran off; the Doctor pursues. Rose notices a crackling force emanating from the Connolly's TV set, and investigates the nearby shop that provided it, Magpie Electricals. An alien entity called the Wire that lives in the TV signal has taken over Mr. Magpie, and is using his television sets to eat people's brains and also faces (somehow).

The Doctor tracks down the hapless police inspector ordering the raids, and finds he has no real plan and is just keeping the blank-faced people in a holding pen to avoid any disruption to the coronation. Another victim is brought in; it is Rose. The next morning, the Queen is on her way to Westminster Abbey, and the Wire is planning to feast on everyone watching the ceremony on TV. The Doctor goes to the Connolly's house again, and Tommy agrees to help him. Tommy's Mum kicks the Dad out of the house when she finds out that he is the one that has been informing the police of new victims of the Wire and getting them taken away. Tommy and the Doctor go to Magpie's shop with the inspector. The Wire attacks, blanking the inspector, and Magpie disappears off with the Wire stored on a portable TV that Magpie has made under instruction from his extra-terrestrial master. The Doctor uses his sonic to free himself and Tommy, and they give chase to the nearby Alexandra Palace transmitter. They defeat the Wire before it can boost itself into everybody's home. All the blank-faced people return to normal. The Doctor and Rose attend a street party, and encourage Tommy to make peace with his Dad.

Context:

I overrode the usual randomised method of picking the story this time. In the UK, the King's coronation was fast approaching (the day Chas gets a new hat, as I was calling it). I didn't want anything to do with the event, and had no plans to watch. I'm resolutely anti-monarchist, though I know some people appreciate the pageantry or the history of such events. I don't like the cost to the public purse, and particularly don't like the police state tendencies such events bring out (beloved local institute the Metropolitan Police tweeted in the run up that their "tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low" and on the day - as they'd just been given powers to stop and search anyone if they believed that person was even thinking of protesting - their bar for what constituted disruption proved to be even lower, the charming and worthwhile bunch of people). Anyway, Doctor Who Magazine did a cover cashing in on the royal event for its current (at the time of writing) issue, which reminded me there was a coronation-themed Doctor Who story, and one I hadn't yet blogged. Enter: The Idiot's Lantern. I could watch this on the 6th May instead of the nonsense dominating the live TV schedules that I wasn't interested in. I proceeded to do just that from the DVD, accompanied by all three children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10) in the afternoon, after the actual crowning but when the TV was still full of post-match analysis that nobody in the household was interested in. All three children had a lot of questions about the plot, which I think is a sign that there are script issues (will go into that in a bit more detail in the Reaction section below).

First Time Round:

I watched this live on its debut BBC1 broadcast on the 27th May 2006 accompanied by the Better Half, who was in the later stage of pregnancy with our first child at the time (he'd be born a month later). I remember thinking that this story and the two Cyberman episodes before it had seen a bit of a slump in quality from the show compared to the earlier stories that year, which themselves were slightly less good than those shown the previous year (Doctor Who's relaunch with Christopher Eccleston and its first modern Christmas special introducing David Tennant). I put this down to difficult second album syndrome, and trusted it would get better (and it did). The Idiot's Lantern was probably my least favourite story of the year, alas. Yes, I liked Fear Her and Love & Monsters much more, sue me!   

Reaction:

One question that each one of the kids asked during the final act of The Idiot's Lantern was some variation on the theme of "Where's the Dad?". It's a question that writer Mark Gatiss might not have thought anybody would be asking; compels me though. Eddie Connolly is thrown out of his home at a moment when everyone else is inside intently watching the coronation, so he can't exactly drop in on anyone else, and the streets of Muswell Hill are presumably deserted. Saving face is important to him, so what does he do? Were the pubs open, and would he have dared show his face in the local anyway? Maybe he just wanders the streets, or heads south towards Westminster Abbey to join the crowds. It's not a great sign that this was a more intriguing question to those watching than anything about how the Doctor and Tommy would defeat the Wire and get Rose's face back. What could be the reasons for this? Well, the Dad is presented for the first two-thirds of the running time as being a key character (the actor playing him, Jamie Foreman is second credited guest star) and he's the only one of Tommy's family not in jeopardy. Will he redeem himself by saving them? Well, no, he won't, he'll just disappear completely for a long period, turning up only after the story climax. The author presumably intended the character to be unsympathetic such that nobody would care what had happened to him. Unfortunately, the script pulls its punches (perhaps literally) about Eddie's behaviour to the point that he doesn't do anything that bad.

The scene where the Doctor and Rose barge into Eddie's home, not knowing whether he's done anything wrong, and proceed to humiliate him in front of his family, makes them look like the smuggest of smug gits. The whole season has them guilty of exuding smugness, but it's at it's absolute worst in this story. It's particularly annoying that Rose's pedanticism about the Union Flag is flat out wrong (it's perfectly acceptable to refer to the UK flag as the Union Jack whether one is on land or sea). Connolly Senior's attitudes towards his wife and child are only ever demonstrated to be, if anything, a little softer than would be the average attitude of a man in his place and time. He's overbearing and a bit patriarchal, yes, but it's 1953. The big accusation from the script is that Eddie has been informing on his neighbours and getting them taken away by the police. This is highlighted as something akin to Stalin's Russia, but it's not. One hapless police officer was just doing something to avoid panic during the coronation, and that police officer - the one who actually was forcibly removing the affected from their homes and locking them up - is presented much more heroically, and gets to team up with the Doctor to confront the villain. Simply put, the Eddie that is on screen doesn't deserve the treatment he gets, and the script eventually acknowledges this with the 'have cake and eat it' end where the Doctor and Rose encourage Tommy to make peace with his Dad. Jamie Foreman turns in a slightly duff performance probably because what's on the page doesn't add up, and the theme has to be hammered home with the far too on-the-nose speech from Tommy about fighting against fascism.

As the intention of the story was to show the impacts on one family's domestic set-up, the family story being fumbled in this way damages everything around it catastrophically. If the family story had worked, it wouldn't matter that the villain is static and scenes featuring her are talky. Maureen Lipman is good as the Wire (at least when she's being calmly menacing, it all goes a bit too large when she gives it the "I'm Hungry" bit), but because of the nature of the character, she can't interact properly with anyone else. It really needed the Ringu moment of her character emerging from the TV into the real world, corporeal at last. The nearest the story gives us is her going briefly from black-and-white to full colour, which is a nice moment but doesn't help the character become more tangible a threat. The modus operandi of the Wire doesn't make any sense either. Feasting on the electrical impulses from the brain leaving people catatonic, that fits, but why would that leave people with faces without any features? And why would the faces end up on TVs in the Magpie Electricals shop (as good a visual as that is)? Another thing that the eldest kept asking throughout was why there were so many dutch angles, and I have absolutely no idea. It doesn't evoke the era depicted either as it would have been captured in reportage or the cinema of the time. I can't help but think it was an attempt to make the somewhat lacklustre material seem more interesting. A misfire then, and a bit of a shame, but the stories would get better as the season progressed (yes, including Fear Her and Love & Monsters - sue me!).

Connectivity:

The villains in both The Idiot's Lantern (The Wire) and The Invasion of Time (Vardans) can exist as wave forms and travel by broadcasting themselves. The investiture of the Doctor as Gallifrey's president in the Tom Baker story is very like a coronation, with the Doctor having the Matrix circlet placed on his head ceremonially.

Deeper Thoughts:

Musical Who. The original idea for the story to fill this slot was more aural than visual. The equivalent to the Wire would have transmitted itself through a catchy 1950s song, rather than a TV picture, and Magpie would have run a record shop rather than an electrical store. Lead writer and exec producer Russell T Davies put this idea to Mark Gatiss as 'Mr Sandman', and Gatiss did at least one draft (named 'Sonic Boom') before things were reworked and early TV, Ally Pally and Elizabeth II's coronation were introduced. A vestige of this idea remained in what made it to screen with the Doctor and Rose at the start in their 1950s outfits talking about Elvis and Cliff Richard. There's also an echo in a later Gatiss script, Sleep No More, which uses the song Mr Sandman to underscore the transmission of a villainous signal from mind to mind (but that's more to do with a sleep acceleration process than the song itself, which is just an extra bit of creepiness layered on top). Aside from that, the idea of a more music-focussed episode was lost. Over the years, Doctor Who has sampled almost every kind of genre and fashioned them into effective stories; it's never, though, done a full-blown musical. Well, it's never done a full-blown musical on TV, I should say. It's done a musical on audio (Big Finish's The Pirates is a riff on Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas, HMS Pinafore particularly) and on stage (The Ultimate Adventure, a late 1980s touring production starring first Jon Pertwee then Colin Baker featured a few tunes). On TV, though, there have been flirtations but the series has never gone all the way.

As with all Doctor Who's TV subgenres, the experimental and adventurous storylines of William Hartnell's era got there first. As something of a trial for a story using musical interludes, there was The Gunfighters in Doctor Who's third season towards the end of Hartnell's tenure. It frequently punctuates the action with a song that complements the non-musical action in presenting the plot. It's one song rather than a variety of different ones, but the lyrics do keep changing. It's usually not sung by any of the characters, instead sounding out as a voiceover by a narrator performer who does not appear elsewhere in the action. The companion characters of Steven and Dodo do sing it in one scene, but naturalistically, tthe characters really performing a song to other characters in the scene. There seems to be a barrier that the series cannot transgress about showing characters break out into song super-naturalistically, when the song may be representative of thoughts or a conversation, or maybe representative of an in-story world where everyone does break out into song occasionally and nobody bats an eyelid. This is a musical theatre mainstay, but seems a step too far for Doctor Who. This may be because the show already incorporates a lot of artifice by its very nature, and incorporating a true musical theatre style on top of all that may push things over the edge, or over the top. It could though just be because The Gunfighters wasn't a particularly popular story, and so nobody wanted to do something similar again. The nearest the classic series came was many years later with the music heavy 1950s-set story Delta and the Bannermen, which had some naturalistic musical performances of era contemporary songs, and one original non-diegetic song.

From 2005 on, the regular composer for the new series years Murray Gold got into the habit of writing one or two songs a year as well as every episode's incidental music. They were always presented as diegetic and naturalistic, though. They might be played in by a DJ (Love Don't Roam in The Runaway Bride), or a band (The Stowaway in Voyage of the Damned) or as a full-on Broadway number, albeit within the universe of the story (My Angel Put The Devil In me in Daleks in Manhattan). When Matt Smith took over from David Tennant as the Doctor, things edged towards stepping over that naturalistic line (the character played by Katherine Jenkins in A Christmas Carol sings Abigail's Song, but who in the world of that story is performing the stirring orchestral accompaniment?). The closest the new series has come to a full-on musical is probably the story The Rings of Akhaten, the plot of which revolves around performing a big production number involving a chorus of pretty much all the guest cast. In more recent years, things have tailed off. Peter Capaldi's Doctor often used to strum an electric guitar, but Gold wrote no original songs for him to play; then, the composer for the Jodie Whittaker era Segun Akinola seemingly had no inclination towards songwriting. With Gold returning to the series from this years specials onwards, has the time finally come for Doctor Who to go the whole hog with a musical episode? Buffy, a major inspiration for the new series when it returned in 2005, famously blazed a trail with the episode Once More With Feeling, and that was over 20 years ago now. Musical stars Jinkx Monsoon and Jonathan Groff have both been recently announced as appearing in Ncuti Gatwa's first series. Could it be? Only time and time signatures will tell...

In Summary:

Some TV maybe does rot your brain!