Staying Inside
I might as well admit it early on.
This is a blog. A blog with some crap template I took from blogger.com, because I haven't the faintest idea what I'm doing in techno-land. And there's many things I hate, but damned if I don't hate blogland most of all. It's long been my contention that the thing that's really destroying our culture isn't Global Warming, or SARS, or the reality that Brian Cowen is now going to be leading the country, which is only one step up from Daniel O'Donnell (but still five steps up from Bertie).
Nope, the thing that's really eating us up is self-absorption. It might seem like extrapolation but it seems obvious that, if you breed a culture where people only care about whether they can afford an iPhone or how their lipstick looks, then of course you're going to end up in a situation where they don't give a flying fuck about things being slightly more uncomfortable for future generations. And blogging seems to be where this really takes root - dozens of websites full of people complaining about the guy next door leaving a note on their car, or their latest date not working out, or more or less anything banal that happened in their life this week. For those who've stumbled for the first time on to this page, and miraculously kept on reading, I should explain that it used to host a sort of Irish monthly cultural review (old issues of which can be found here), and latterly a podcast. I should think it had a readership of about six, but most importantly - it wasn't about me. Unfortunately it was also a lot of work, and degenerated into something that was obviously a blog anyway. Which was when I stopped.
So here, it's reconvening, largely because I have to complain to someone and my friends tend to get bored. This is the realreview.ie blog, which may well be accompanied by the realreview.ie podcast soon enough. In the meantime, there are a few rules:
In fact...
Doctor Who
Doctor Who's a good place to start. Because it was back yesterday, starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate. Yes. That's right. Catherine "I almost ruined Bleak House just by being in it for sixty seconds" Tate. Catherine "About as funny as genital warts" Tate. Catherine "Shouting is funny, it must be 'cos I'm a comedienne and it's all I can do" Tate. Catherine "Insert Death Sentence here" Tate.
And the thing is that Doctor Who's genius, the reason that it's the greatest television show ever made, is that it's about looking outside. When it came back, largely Earthbound and with a savvy Doctor, it still understood this. The first episode asked us to look at a wheelie bin as a murderous monster, or look at the London Eye as an alien artefact. You could call it a constant redefinition of the ordinary, if you wanted to be pretentious about it.
The new series is a different beast to the old one, of course. Series One - you know, with that big-eared bloke who got stabbed by Robert Carlyle in Cracker - was a thing of wonder. Since then it's been up-and-down, as you might expect from what's basically an episodic format. Still, success corrupts. NuWho has been getting increasingly more insular and a product of showbizland, the sort of thing that's more concerned with entertaining media-luvvies who will watch anything crap because then they can be ironic about it. The casting of Catherine Tate - who up until now has never shown any sign of being anything other than a terrible actress, and that includes her previous appearance in Doctor Who - is a sign of this.
The plot was the sort of thing that Doctor Who can do well - there's a new diet pill being propogated by an effortlessly creepy Sarah Lancashire, but actually it creates little creatures called Adipose out of your fat. Ugh. Nice idea, but...
...but nothing happens with it at all. This isn't Doctor Who the series, but Doctor Who the cultural icon. The story consists mostly of Catherine Tate and David Tennant running around, while Tate mugs to the camera and shouts at people during the odd break. It doesn't feel like a story at all, more a star vehicle for the two leads to do that thing they've become famous for. Tennant talks very fast and waves his arms around, and Tate - you guessed it - shouts a lot. There's even a joke in there in which Sarah Lancashire's villain is called a Supernanny, which doesn't make any sense unless you're the sort of smug media-aware adult who watches Supernanny (a bit like Dead Ringers, a show which expects us to know the name of every single BBC newsreader and watch every single reality TV show out there). The fears are confirmed - Tate's character may be called Donna but she's clearly playing Catherine Tate, the shouty caricaturist who's unfathomably popular with a few million of the UK population (but undoubtedly hated by the rest).
The obvious problem with the story is that she's not really doing anything terribly bad. Breeding aliens out of people's fat may sound a bit wuuuh, but the only people who die do so as a result of Donna and the Doctor's interference. In fact, the only thing that the Doctor can find to chastise her is that intervention on a Level 5 Planet is illegal. That, it seems, is where we are - whereas Eccleston's Doctor was quite happy to let gaseous beings walk around in corpses, calling it nothing more than than recycling, Tennant's quotes rules without even questioning what's behind them. It's impossible to imagine this story starring Eccleston, because his Doctor would probably have given Supernanny a hand.
Ultimately, though, the problem's even more insidious - it's the crushingly insular banality of the story, which slaps you like a wet fish at every turn. The Doctor says that Martha fancied him as if he's quite chuffed about it, that woman who Catherine Tate goes to see gleefully says she's going to dump her boyfriend now that she can do better, Donna dismisses a holiday in Egypt as "guidebooks and don't drink the water", and rather than have her getting involved with the Adipose industries to find out what they're doing, she's using it as a way of possibly bumping into the Doctor. None of it is threatening; none of it is funny, except for the reasonably amusing Doc-and-Donna-don't-quite-meet stuff at the start; none of it goes anywhere, and none of it has any reason for existing. At all.
The most damning thing of all is that it didn't even anger me. Bad stories make me angry, in general, but this couldn't even do that. Because ultimately it's not a story so much as a place, a light-entertainment-showbiz piece with guest stars. It doesn't even feel like Doctor Who, so much as a Doctor Who skit that's airing on Children in Need next year. It's so firmly ensconced in the detritus of the mass media, so gleefully a part of that detritus, and so self-aware of its place within it, that it sits vacuously on screen as yet another facet of the telly-circus. It's not an episode so much as a bleating panto, replete with celebrities. Bad stories make me angry, but this doesn't even come close - because it's not really a story at all.
This is a blog. A blog with some crap template I took from blogger.com, because I haven't the faintest idea what I'm doing in techno-land. And there's many things I hate, but damned if I don't hate blogland most of all. It's long been my contention that the thing that's really destroying our culture isn't Global Warming, or SARS, or the reality that Brian Cowen is now going to be leading the country, which is only one step up from Daniel O'Donnell (but still five steps up from Bertie).
Nope, the thing that's really eating us up is self-absorption. It might seem like extrapolation but it seems obvious that, if you breed a culture where people only care about whether they can afford an iPhone or how their lipstick looks, then of course you're going to end up in a situation where they don't give a flying fuck about things being slightly more uncomfortable for future generations. And blogging seems to be where this really takes root - dozens of websites full of people complaining about the guy next door leaving a note on their car, or their latest date not working out, or more or less anything banal that happened in their life this week. For those who've stumbled for the first time on to this page, and miraculously kept on reading, I should explain that it used to host a sort of Irish monthly cultural review (old issues of which can be found here), and latterly a podcast. I should think it had a readership of about six, but most importantly - it wasn't about me. Unfortunately it was also a lot of work, and degenerated into something that was obviously a blog anyway. Which was when I stopped.
So here, it's reconvening, largely because I have to complain to someone and my friends tend to get bored. This is the realreview.ie blog, which may well be accompanied by the realreview.ie podcast soon enough. In the meantime, there are a few rules:
- Posts will be weekly, unless I can't be arsed
- At no point, ever ever ever, will I talk about myself or my life. I know some people like reading other people's complaints about being stuck on the DART or getting bad food in some restaurant or other, but they've got the letters page of the Metro to keep them entertained
- Pointless vulgarity, liberal levels of abuse and completely untrue slurs will be included wherever possible
- Doctor Who will be referenced an awful lot. Deal with it.
- It's still going to be an Irish cultural review. Sort of.
In fact...
Doctor Who
Doctor Who's a good place to start. Because it was back yesterday, starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate. Yes. That's right. Catherine "I almost ruined Bleak House just by being in it for sixty seconds" Tate. Catherine "About as funny as genital warts" Tate. Catherine "Shouting is funny, it must be 'cos I'm a comedienne and it's all I can do" Tate. Catherine "Insert Death Sentence here" Tate.
And the thing is that Doctor Who's genius, the reason that it's the greatest television show ever made, is that it's about looking outside. When it came back, largely Earthbound and with a savvy Doctor, it still understood this. The first episode asked us to look at a wheelie bin as a murderous monster, or look at the London Eye as an alien artefact. You could call it a constant redefinition of the ordinary, if you wanted to be pretentious about it.
The new series is a different beast to the old one, of course. Series One - you know, with that big-eared bloke who got stabbed by Robert Carlyle in Cracker - was a thing of wonder. Since then it's been up-and-down, as you might expect from what's basically an episodic format. Still, success corrupts. NuWho has been getting increasingly more insular and a product of showbizland, the sort of thing that's more concerned with entertaining media-luvvies who will watch anything crap because then they can be ironic about it. The casting of Catherine Tate - who up until now has never shown any sign of being anything other than a terrible actress, and that includes her previous appearance in Doctor Who - is a sign of this.
The plot was the sort of thing that Doctor Who can do well - there's a new diet pill being propogated by an effortlessly creepy Sarah Lancashire, but actually it creates little creatures called Adipose out of your fat. Ugh. Nice idea, but...
...but nothing happens with it at all. This isn't Doctor Who the series, but Doctor Who the cultural icon. The story consists mostly of Catherine Tate and David Tennant running around, while Tate mugs to the camera and shouts at people during the odd break. It doesn't feel like a story at all, more a star vehicle for the two leads to do that thing they've become famous for. Tennant talks very fast and waves his arms around, and Tate - you guessed it - shouts a lot. There's even a joke in there in which Sarah Lancashire's villain is called a Supernanny, which doesn't make any sense unless you're the sort of smug media-aware adult who watches Supernanny (a bit like Dead Ringers, a show which expects us to know the name of every single BBC newsreader and watch every single reality TV show out there). The fears are confirmed - Tate's character may be called Donna but she's clearly playing Catherine Tate, the shouty caricaturist who's unfathomably popular with a few million of the UK population (but undoubtedly hated by the rest).
The obvious problem with the story is that she's not really doing anything terribly bad. Breeding aliens out of people's fat may sound a bit wuuuh, but the only people who die do so as a result of Donna and the Doctor's interference. In fact, the only thing that the Doctor can find to chastise her is that intervention on a Level 5 Planet is illegal. That, it seems, is where we are - whereas Eccleston's Doctor was quite happy to let gaseous beings walk around in corpses, calling it nothing more than than recycling, Tennant's quotes rules without even questioning what's behind them. It's impossible to imagine this story starring Eccleston, because his Doctor would probably have given Supernanny a hand.
Ultimately, though, the problem's even more insidious - it's the crushingly insular banality of the story, which slaps you like a wet fish at every turn. The Doctor says that Martha fancied him as if he's quite chuffed about it, that woman who Catherine Tate goes to see gleefully says she's going to dump her boyfriend now that she can do better, Donna dismisses a holiday in Egypt as "guidebooks and don't drink the water", and rather than have her getting involved with the Adipose industries to find out what they're doing, she's using it as a way of possibly bumping into the Doctor. None of it is threatening; none of it is funny, except for the reasonably amusing Doc-and-Donna-don't-quite-meet stuff at the start; none of it goes anywhere, and none of it has any reason for existing. At all.
The most damning thing of all is that it didn't even anger me. Bad stories make me angry, in general, but this couldn't even do that. Because ultimately it's not a story so much as a place, a light-entertainment-showbiz piece with guest stars. It doesn't even feel like Doctor Who, so much as a Doctor Who skit that's airing on Children in Need next year. It's so firmly ensconced in the detritus of the mass media, so gleefully a part of that detritus, and so self-aware of its place within it, that it sits vacuously on screen as yet another facet of the telly-circus. It's not an episode so much as a bleating panto, replete with celebrities. Bad stories make me angry, but this doesn't even come close - because it's not really a story at all.
posted by Nyder O'Leary at
18:48
4 Comments:
*Breeding aliens out of people's fat may sound a bit wuuuh* - welcome back!
It's not really an idea is it? Diet pills are a bit mid-to-late-eighties but there is an idea there. Losing weight through pills - to where? To WHEN?! Can you time-travel your flab into a weight problem future generations will have to deal with? Still poor, but a bit more 2008. Even better, have folks from the mid to late eighties doing it to us now... Fat people everywhere with zipper crises and Incredible Hulk clothing makeovers. Get me to the meeting I can sell this one...
"Diet pills are a bit mid-to-late-eighties"
Don't think you can steal quotes from Spaced around here and it won't get spotted, matey.
Interesting, but the problem with your idea is that nobody from the eighties really had weight problems; it was just that they carried around an extra stone in the form of mullets and shoulder-pads.
You can't be overweight in a decade where Spandex is fashionable. It's just asking for trouble.
"it's so mid to late eighties" was a bit of throwaway abuse Robert Payne hurled at my treasured book of Francisco Mangado Architect way back when I was trying to be corporate boy/teachers pet. He would have fired me on the spot if Twist had come looking for a job, even if she only had dry cleaning on her CV.
Some of those mullets seem to have wafted back through time - when we start seeing shoulder pads it's time to nick the rifle from Charlton's coffin and start shooting thin people in their fourties...
The Doctor and his material girl Mad Donna - very mid to late 80's.
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