Occupy White Walls Does Doctor Who (part one)

Today, gentle reader, and after a protracted absence – hey, it’s sunny and we’re allowed out now! – we delve deep into the heady realms of art, and how it’s displayed. And yes, there is a definite Doctor Who link, but you’ll have to read on (or casually scroll to the bottom; it’s bad manners but I’ll be none the wiser) to find out exactly what it is.

It’s a strange name for a video game, but then Occupy White Walls is a strange sort of game. That’s if you can call it a game at all. It’s more of a virtual art curator / gallery-building experience. Broadly speaking you’re given a sea of blank space (literally: the game opens on a pleasant oceanic backdrop and an island of floating white floor in the middle of it) and encouraged to build your own gallery. You do this by placing blocks – different floors, different walls, ceilings, lighting, architecture – wherever you want them. You’re free to redesign your space at will, change colours, move and even delete structures entirely: some objects will snap into place, but as a general rule nothing is off limits. When you’re ready, you hang artwork on the walls. Well, it’s a gallery, right?

Said art can be aquired from DAISY, the in-house virtual AI, who lists paintings seemingly at random and then learns over time to filter them according to the sort of stuff you like. This never really seemed to work in practice for me – I’d find renaissance art and dull Victorian portraits all over the place, despite concentrating almost exclusively on modern art and photography – although I gather things have improved since I stopped buying new art. Paintings vary in size and scale, from small photos that you have to squint to examine to the likes of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement, which is so big it required me to build a new room (well, outside platform) in which to house it. Artists range in scope – traditional landscape painters, religious artworks and surrealist masterpieces are all represented, and anything has the potential to be included provided they’ve either struck a deal or it’s in the public domain (so there is, alas, no Dali as of yet).

Expanding your gallery space costs money – which takes place in the form of virtual currency known simply as ‘cubes’ – and you earn more of these by opening your viewing space to the public in thirty-minute sessions, whereupon it may be visited either by anyone who happens to be logged in, or a collection of bots who phase in and out of the gallery space, nod appreciatively at whatever you happen to have hanging there and perform the occasional backflip. Opening and closing repeatedly is the quickest way to level up, which means there’s a certain amount of grinding early on, but once you reach level 30 you unlock all the assets in the range and things really start to get interesting.

If you want the gist of how the whole thing works, you could do a lot worse than read this, but the biggest selling point of OWW is that it’s got no selling point at all – it’s available at no cost, bar a supplementary soundtrack album (which you are under no compulsion to buy, although I did) and the option to upload your own artwork at $9 a pop. And if it seems a little silly, having your own space on which to buy and hang virtual art, it’s worth bearing in mind that the game came out not long before Covid hit, and given that we spent much of last year stuck indoors, its presence on Steam couldn’t have been any more timely. Certainly the nature of the experience – log on, do a little world-building, casually and graduallly expanding your rooms, changing the sky, re-imagining the floors, filling a room with statues, perhaps adding an extra wing when you’re particularly flush…there’s something vastly therapeutic about it. It’s not a substitute for the Tate, but it’s a good start.

I’ve seen a fair bit in OWW – celestial glass-walled viewing areas looking out onto the wilds of the universe; vast Nordic-themed lakeside galleries; underwater treasure troves; homages to the London underground where Monet and Renoir jostle for space next to the ‘MIND THE GAP’ signs; even a recreation of the space station from 2001, with a door that leads into the hotel room that Keir Dullea reaches at the film’s conclusion. But it doesn’t really do a lot when it’s written down. Walking round a virtual gallery or two really is the best way to fire up your imagination, and it was only when I’d seen what other people had achieved that I started to come up with a creative vision of what I could do with a workspace limited only by funds and my ageing computer’s memory.

Scroll up a bit. That overhead shot you can see? The one with the chess board in the middle? That’s my gallery. Well, a part of it. The waterfront theme didn’t really kick into gear until I built the pier you can see just above. It takes its cue from the one at Boscombe: long and minimalist, and there’s a copy of The Scream hanging on one of the glass walls at the end. From its edge, you can see the corners of the bricked industrial area and the large installation space where I hung a Mondrian and then built an enormous replica out of coloured walls to go alongside it. The whole space grew organically, and owes quite a lot to Frank Lloyd Wright, but I didn’t realise this when I was expanding – it was all about just adding rooms to offset the tedium of lockdown.

But why stop at one gallery? Why just one, when you can do this?

The Highway is perhaps the work I’m most proud of. I’d already made the Chapel – a church interior designed as a place of reflection and remembrance – but wondered what would happen if I built a long, straight road that stretched off into the distance, as far as I could, and just put things alongside it. There is an abandoned, crumbling warehouse and an electrical substation. There is a gaudy sixties bridge and a tunnel that leads to nowhere. Halfway up there is a memorial garden. And there is a vast slab of grey stretching off to the right, all tall oppressive corridors, that opens out into a large open plaza where I built a mosaic on the walls.

But there was another reason to build the Highway, and this, oh faithful reader, is where the Doctor Who connection kicks in. Because if you wander up, you’ll notice that the Angel of the North overlooks a nondescript-looking building that might be just a wee bit familiar.

Designing the interior required a certain amount of improvisation, but after a bit of jiggery pokery I managed to get the counter area more or less the way I wanted it. The seats were trickier, because of what’s available – what you see here is a second draft, and it’s still not quite got the booth feel I really wanted, but it’s not a bad estimate. While it was impossible to recreate all the art they had in the original, I managed to at least capture the feel – and another mosaic on the back wall served as a decent substitute for the stars-and-stripes flag.

But the best bit? There’s a door at the back, and – well…

All right. It’s a disaster. You have no idea how difficult it was to build a convincing hexagonal structure that looked like it might pass for a console. What you can see is a collection of metal desks, awkwardly grouped together into something that looks vaguely right until you get too close. Oh, and there’s a single column of light stretching upwards; it doesn’t move but perhaps we could just say it’s parked? The round things are good, anyway. Even if I don’t know what they’re for.

It wasn’t the only TARDIS I built – but you’ll have to wait until next time to see that one, as it’s a whopper and it’s going to take us some time to walk around it properly. In the meantime, here’s a little post-credit scene. It takes place at Mr Webley’s World of Colour (yes, that is a ‘Nightmare in Silver’ reference). Unlike many of my other creations, this was always envisaged as a definitive place with a beginning and an end – a large, multi-storeyed building in which each room deals with aspects of a different slice of the rainbow, with lighting, decor and artwork to match.

You get the idea. It’s a one-way system (which was disturbingly prophetic) but there is a place of respite halfway along, taking the form of a rooftop garden of which I’m reasonably proud.

In case you’re wondering how I managed black and white, the black is a small dark room with a projector broadcasting looped footage from Un Chien Andalou – something a number of people have done. Although I’m pretty sure none of them have did what I did in the white room.

“And that,” says the First Doctor, “is a chair with a frog on it.”

Coming up next time: swimming pools that are not in the library, and a never-before-seen shot of the TARDIS toilet. Speaking of which, I’ll just leave this here…

Have I Got Whos For You (shameful catch-up edition)

Gosh. Has it really been a month? I’m sorry. I’d make the excuse that we were away – that usually works – but we weren’t away that much; I think things have just got on top of me a bit. There are reasons. You don’t get to hear them. Still, it’s time we got back into the swing of things – I have a bunch of new videos to show you, the second half of that Production Myths debacle that landed me in hot water in at least one Facebook group, and…well, who knows? But we’ll talk about something, usually Doctor Who. Come with me, semi-constant reader, as we tread the fine line between social distancing and all-out lockdown that will hopefully take us to Christmas, and a new episode that is bound not to live up to the hype.

 

First, this.

Cue brief Facebook explosion.

 

“HANDS! FACE! SPACE! HANDS! FACE! SPACE! HANDS! FACE! SPACE!”

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Thorpe Park, and it looks like we’re all screwed.

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“Listen, we’re gonna get you out of here. But with the benefit of hindsight, I think you probably shouldn’t have tried to sing Rule Britannia.”

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“Gavin? I think I’ve fixed that algorithm.”

—

Posted without comment.

—

And finally: we have the Prime Minister to thank for this one. Well, at least he’s good for something.

The Smallerpictures Video Dump (2020, part three)

I wish I could tell you that I’d got on with that novel while we’ve been stuck at home. Or that I’d learned to sew, or reached a sense of inner peace, or at least slowed down a bit. But my life was already fairly slow and empty, and I rather liked it that way. My world now, instead, is a world of hastily improvised routines of family breakfasts and Zoom webinars and P.E. with Joe; of virtual meetings with my church housegroup; of listening, every Thursday, to the sound of no one in our street clapping for the NHS; of refusing out of principle to partake in those watchalongs because if there’s one thing DW fans know how to do it’s take a good idea and flog it to death, or at least until all the novelty has well and truly worn off. We’re fortunate, where we are, but oh dear God this road is long – and there are no winding turns, simply a series of erratic curves.

Anyway, how are the Doctors spending lockdown? Today, we catch up with just three of them. But they’re the three everyone likes, so that’s a good start.

 

1. Public Safety Announcement (April 2020)

You know we never stoop to cliche here at Brian of Morbius, but if we did, this would be the point at which I told you this will all be over by Christmas. That’s actually based on scientific insight, correct (at least theoretically) as we go to press, which dictates that under an idealised plan of social distancing and appropriate quarantine the virus could be squashed by 4 December. Now, you and I both know that this is unlikely, but I do at least hope we’ll be allowed out by then – and not stuck in Caerphilly Castle with Peter Capaldi, who’s been wandering its dimly-lit corridors for the better part of four billion years.

This was a lot of fun to put together, largely because it was simply a question of going through the episode and finding appropriate (yes, all right, inappropriate) clips to match up with the government advice. Sometimes that’s a long, hard slog – unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, and generally I don’t, then you have to rely on memory and association and transcript searches. But sticking with a single episode restricts you, which makes that endless scrubbing back and forth all the easier to endure. Every one of this clips is taken from ‘Heaven Sent’ – with one exception. Can you spot it?

 

2. The Ninth Doctor channel hops (April 2020)

The Twelfth Doctor’s been dive-bombing a lake and getting his skull melted by a Dickens reject. Three regenerations back, one of his predecessors is stuck in a flat with Jackie Tyler. I know where my sympathies lie. Sorry, Peter; you’re on your own.

Eccleston is notoriously catty about some of his former roles. Thor 2, for example, was “like having a gun in your mouth”. He’s not much happier about G.I. Joe. I also read that he hated to be asked about Raymond Calitri, which is why it’s in here – but supposedly he’s cooled off about that over the years, so perhaps a reconciliation with the MCU may be on the cards. Although somehow I doubt it; he’s not exactly in a hurry to go back to Doctor Who.

But everyone has a breaking point. What would it take for Eccleston to relive those hours in the makeup chair? Watch it, and you’ll see.

 

3. The Tenth Doctor in Lockdown (May 2020)

Now, this was a departure. Not because it’s particularly different in tone or approach – awkward enjambment of two contrasting sources is something I’ve been doing since year dot – but because I managed, after some trial and error, to get a picture-in-picture effect when the Doctor’s watching the screen. It lasts for approximately three seconds and it’s by no means perfect (look closely and you can see Tennant’s head walking through the bottom of the image) but it’s vital, because it establishes that he’s looking at it there and then in the heart of the Crucible. You nail that, and everything else follows.

Oh, and I make no apologies for anyone I might offend with this, because I think the only person who’s likely to be offended is Ian Levine. And Ian Levine is, for want of a better word, a complete cockwomble.

Have I Got Whos For You (isolated bank holiday edition)

OK. You remember that boot thing that was doing the rounds this week? Well…

It was a silly thing that took me ten minutes and I’m not even the first to do it, but it sort of exploded. An awful lot of Rocky Horror memes, and quite a few Barrowman references. Which kind of fits, I suppose.

Elsewhere: it’s World Naked Gardening Day, although some people are keener on the idea than others.

—

Speaking of Mr Capaldi, here he is celebrating World Penguin Day.

—

Sometimes when you’re bereft of ideas, you just have to check the trending column. Every day is a celebration of some sort; even the most ridiculous, mundane things (National Beard Day? Really?) get their own hashtag, sparking all sorts of inane chatter and, if you’re me, some hasty Photoshopping to catch the traffic. I won’t pretend I’m proud of this, not least because all the time I’m doing that I’m not writing the book, but we’re on lockdown and I keep telling myself it’s a mindfulness activity.

For example, 26 April was Alien Day, named as it is for colony LV426. It’s a little flimsy, but so is Pi day (which doesn’t work, incidentally, if you’re British, any more than the “Hey, look at that van go!” ones do). Still, any excuse.

—

The Thirteenth Doctor’s been doing the rounds a bit this week. Here she is at a table tennis match.

—

“No, honestly, it’s me; I’ve just lost a bit of weight since then.”

—

I can’t work out whether the others have seen something off camera or are simply bored. Either way it looks like it’s all about to head south. Perhaps they’re better off staying closer to home.

“Yeah, you remember I mentioned the Woolly Rebellion…?”

Have I Got Whos For You (Lockdown Special)

“LET’S ROCK!”

There are good things coming to BoM in the next few days, but I also have a few time-sensitive images I really ought to be sharing, so we’ll do that first. Sharing these days seems to be the new black, whether it’s books or audio material or free online tuition, all hastily assembled in a disassociative spirit of ‘community’. Isn’t it great, the internet seems to be collectively screaming, how a pandemic makes us all better people? (Hashtag strongertogether? wewillgetthroughthis? Pick one.)

I’m cynical, but that’s largely because I know full well that the sea change the left are predicting or clamouring for is probably not going to materialise. If there’s one thing that life has taught me – one thing Doctor Who has taught me – it’s that people have remarkably short memories. No foxhole housed an atheist, and when we’re all in a spot – and forced, within the confines of our homes and local neighbourhoods, to indulge in extended periods of reflection, it’s easy to think that Things Will Be Different once this is all over. It would be lovely if that were so; something has to give, and heaven knows it’s been a blessed relief not having to read about Brexit these past few weeks, even if my feed is otherwise clogged with pictures of sunbathing tourists and deserted shopping centres. But I’m reminded, I’m afraid, of the end of An Inspector Calls, and the scene where the Birling family, having believed for a minute or two, that they’ve got away with the crimes to which they’ve confessed that evening, start to talk about things getting back to normal – only for karma to intervene in a sudden and dramatic manner with the sound of a ringing phone.

The phones do not ring here. For one thing we’re all on Messenger; for another, life seldom imitates art so neatly. There will be lessons learned, but not by those who need to learn them the most. And we’ll all go back to Netflix marathons and jokes about the next election, and things will continue much as they were. And perhaps that’s not the terrible calamity I’m painting it to be. Perhaps.

In the meantime we’re all apparently supposed to saturate Facebook with beach pictures to lighten the mood. Fair enough; here’s mine.

—

There are rumours doing the rounds about the actual cause of the virus, which – if you believe everything you read on the internet – has less to do with bats and more to do with 5G, leading to a spate of online petitions, debunked conspiracy theories in open access journals, and the occasional act of vandalism on a telephone mast.

—

Meanwhile, as he recovers from the effects of COVID-19 at St. Thomas’ Hospital, Boris Johnson receives an unexpected visitor.

(Oh God. This one is going to date very badly, isn’t it?)

In the meantime – unless you’re a key worker – you’re probably doing what I’m doing, which is staying home, getting up later than you should and doing more than some people advise and less than others suggest, which probably means you’re getting the balance about right. I implore you, constant reader, to keep your chin up, and if you’re in a dark place, please tell someone about it. Even if that person is me, and even if you’re simply using the comments box. At least you’ll get a response that way. Or just tell me what you’ve been doing; what books you’ve read, what TV you’ve watched; tell me about the novel you’re planning but will probably never write; the prospects for exercise in the local community; how many people in your street clapped for the NHS. Or tell me nothing. I’m fine with that, and I will keep the memes coming in any case.

Of course, you probably could go to the beach, if you were careful about it.

Now, how was that sentence going to end…?

Have I Got Whos For You (Interlude)

All is not well in Planet Who, folks. There is discontent over the absence of a trailer, anticipatiion fatigue over the BBC’s continuing refusal to name a date, and a general sense of ambivalence about whether it’s going to be any good considering the writers they’ve got on board for next series. And over in a Viking village, Edgar’s let his sneeze get the better of him again.

—

I spent half an hour yesterday trying to interpolate footage from this year’s John Lewis advert into footage of explosions and disintegrating snowmen and the cracking of ice. It did not go well. My heart simply wasn’t in it, which is never a good beginning. So I cleaned the bathroom instead. There’s no video this week, but at least the house smells fragrant. We’ve done John Lewis before – more than once – and that comparative post I did back in 2016 really is due a revamp. Maybe next year. Maybe.

There was a pile of good things. Georgia Tennant posted a photo on Instagram of her new baby’s induction into the world of Doctor Who, although there was some concern over the episode that she was watching.

“HUNGRY,” said one FB user I occasionally interact with, to which the response from me was “Wrong episode.”

“Close, though, right?”

“Five years out. So in the grand scheme of things…”

If we’re talking series 12, of course, you have to work with what you’ve got. For example, a few weeks back we became aware of a suspected leaked image from an upcoming sequel to ‘Flatline’, although there was immediate speculation as to whether or not it was fake.

It’s not fake, surely? I mean it’s got lighting and everything.

One thing that definitely isn’t fake is the Dalek redesign, which was recently spotted on Clifton Suspension Bridge during a closed ‘maintenance’ slot which was actually booked for the BBC. There was immediate uproar over the apparent redesign, which served no purpose except to highlight the double standards inherent in the assessment of such things, because the Cybermen have been going for almost as long as the Daleks and the new ones are basically unrecognisable, whereas the Daleks have hardly changed at all over the years and the moment they do there’s wailing and crying and gnashing of teeth. Maybe that’s the whole problem. Perhaps a general evolution would have made the removal of the sink plunger an acceptable thing. Perhaps they’ve signed up to a twenty-four hour callout service and there’s no longer any need to do it themselves.

Anyway, it turns out there’s a reason for it.

—

I’ve been struggling a little bit with Thomas’s school this week, who have been perhaps less than understanding about some of his additional needs, even though they usually do a good job. We have explained to him that while copying out the question before you add the answer does seem rather pointless, you sometimes simply have to toe the line and pick your battles. We live in a system of assessments and targets and indecipherable lingo, and with four kids at four schools it really can be a bit of a minefield.

Anyway, Thomas is basically happy, but I do wish he’d read more. It’s Ripley’s Believe it or Not or a Beano annual or something in the Big Nate range, and while I’m not a reading snob of any sort there’s a wealth of great stuff out there he’s missing out on simply because he can’t be bothered. Occasionally – just occasionally – you can find something that’ll interest him, like we did when we found a Derren Brown book about hypnotism and the power of suggestion. He’d developed something of an interest in the man after regular visits to Thorpe Park this year where we all got rather attached to the Derren Brown ghost train – a ride I’m not allowed to spoil, because they ask you not to. Then this book showed up in a charity shop and he was riveted. It’s the sort of thing that makes me shudder, just faintly, because whether it’s genuine psychic ability or a simple confidence trick Brown is a piggin’ genius and the thought of Thomas going down that road makes me wonder what the consequences would be. It’s like giving the supersoldier serum to Red Skull. “No man should have that kind of power.”

I was trying to find something for him the other week when I stumbled upon this hideously inappropriate Doctor Who novel. I could still let him read it; the joke would probably sail over his head.

Audiobook available soon from all good streaming services.

Star Wars updates now – and cometh the man, cometh the Mandalorian.

It’s not just me, is it? Tell me it’s not just me.

I am trying to put my finger on the moment I lost interest in the Star Wars franchise. It might have been the Clone Wars movie. It might actually have been Shadows of the Empire, Lucas’ 1997 foray into episode 5.5 territory that tried several approaches, none of which really worked. The book was particularly disastrous. Years down the line and we’re bombarded with spin-offs no one asked for and comparatively few people watched and now there’s a TV series about a masked bounty hunter who may or may not be Boba Fett (is he Boba Fett? I haven’t bothered to find out) and oh look, George Lucas has changed the Greedo death AGAIN. If I’m grouchy about this it’s because Disney has announced this week that they’re pulling the Lego Star Wars exhibit from Legoland Windsor because for some unfathomable reason the sight of tiny brick men in a dimly-lit walkthrough will be enough to prevent people going to their own Star Wars-themed parks, most of which are in another country. I am one of the few people who objected to Disney buying the thing a few years back – as far as I was concerned they couldn’t come up with a bigger mess than Attack of the Clones, and thus far I’ve been proved right – but this annoys me. Next time I might just take the kids to a museum instead.

I mean honestly.

We conclude with politics, and Kay Burley has an empty chair in her studio.

I had a conversation with Trevor Baxendale about this: he’d said it didn’t work for him because the Silence wasn’t actually invisible (a mistake many Who fans seem to make when they’re making jokes about them online), so surely she’d be able to see it? We were back and forth for a bit, with me explaining myself and the two of us eventually agreeing that the actual concept of the Silence was so vague there is wiggle room. Better yet that we should concentrate on episodes of Doctor Who that actually work. Like ‘Heaven Sent’, for example, seeing as we seem to be on a bit of a series 9 kick this morning. I had cause to rewatch ‘Heaven Sent’ this week – for reasons that will become apparent another time – and one thing that strikes me is how meticulously constructed the whole thing is; aside from certain questions about where the first set of dry clothes came from it really hangs together quite well.

“What?”

Have I Got Whos For You (Twelfth Doctor Special)

Unposted meme count is currently 126 and counting, which means it’s time for another bonus edition: stuff I haven’t got round to uploading yet, loosely themed simply because there are so many languishing in that folder that they’ve developed their own tribe system. Today it’s the turn of the Twelfth Doctor – the one whose hair became more and more difficult to Photoshop the longer he stuck around (God alone knows what would have happened if they’d got him to commit to a fourth series). There’s something very stern and serious about him, of course, which makes him the perfect Doctor to mesh with children’s programmes. And in many cases here, that’s exactly what’s happened.

The last time we did one of these, it was Thirteenth Doctor related and I got called a ‘retarded Jodie shill’ by an idiot. (That wasn’t all he said, but I blocked some of his other comments.) I suspect there will be no such remittance from today’s outing. Well, hopefully.

 

First, this. Appropriate, given what day it is.

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Dr Venkman. Dr Stantz. Dr Spengler. Dr Smith.

—

Presented without apology.

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“I suppose you’ll be wanting me to help you out of there in a moment.”

—

During a little downtime, the Twelfth Doctor and Darth Vader recreate the Hand of God.

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“Are you sure we’ve never met?”

—

Doctor Who: Face The Ravenclaw.

—

I can’t believe I didn’t do this one years back.

—

“We’re not touching that with a barge pole.”

—

One day, in Teletubbyland.

—

“Yeah, tell you what, we’ll take it back to the yard, see if we can recycle any of it.”

—

Well, it sort of works.

—

“I think we’d better be heading back to the TARDIS, Bill.”

—

And finally.

Tune in next week: same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

Have I Got Whos For You (non-existent general election edition)

I’ll just leave this here.

I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who didn’t have a more ostensibly disastrous week than this man. I have yet to meet a single person – even a Conservative – who actually thinks he’s the right person for the job. Clearly there must be a few of them, and they’re presumably all camped somewhere outside my echo chamber, completely ignoring its existence, but I’ve never known a Prime Minister who’s united the nation like this. Not since Thatcher, anyway, in her last years, when she was one of the most hated women in Britain, besides Mary Whitehouse. These days people are quick to sing her praises; either they have short memories or they were never around for the Poll Tax riots.

Anyway, the day after he lost in the Commons (on something or other; there were so many votes and I lose track) Boris went out on the campaign trail, only to be met with a sea of protesters telling him that he wasn’t really welcome. Or as Capaldi’s Doctor might have put it, “Please leave my planet.”

—

Let’s drift away from the politcs. Over at Hogwarts, Argus Filch reacted badly to the news that Dumbledore’s giving him a little extra help this year.

—

And in consumer affairs, there’s trouble in the TARDIS when the Eleventh Doctor does a little online shopping.

—

Coming right up to date, our fly-on-the-wall entertainment correspondent was on a bus and one thing sort of led to another and…

(Needless to say, I had to lock the comments on this one.)

—

Sports now, and in a national park somewhere in the North, on a beautiful afternoon in late summer, crowds gather to watch the annual DC / Time Lord Sidekick Carry-off.

—

And as the long evening draws to a close, it’s an opportune moment for the hardworking British man to kick back and relax after a blood, sweat and tears of a good day’s honest work.

“Shall we go?”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“We’re waiting for Dodo.”
“Ah.”

Have I Got Whos For You: End-of-August edition

There’s some interesting stuff currently cooling over at the Brian of Morbius foundry. We’ll have a new video dump, some debunking of myths and soon – when the time is right – I’m going to be plugging the short fiction I’ve been writing, in a lazy and half-hearted attempt to reinvent myself as a storyteller rather than a hack. Well, you have to move on.

That’ll have to wait a bit. In the meantime, here’s this week’s roundup – beginning with a blink of disbelief from the fanbase over Peter Capaldi’s current baldness.

—

Elsewhere, Chris Chibnall is knocked out in his flat and wakes up in a strange coastal village, surrounded by shadowy angry figures demanding to know why he didn’t resign.

—

Although there is, as it transpires, good reason to be worried about series 12, as this leaked promotional shot illustrates.

—

Onto lighter things now. On a break from his travels, the Twelfth Doctor is spotted with Ashildr and Clara at a Home Counties theme park.

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And following a dangerous and potentially lethal interstellar musical publicity stunt, the Eleventh Doctor successfully manages to catch Taron Egerton, although sadly the piano was knackered.

—

And finally, in the unexpectedly leafy outskirts of Central London, there’s an unexpected visitor outside the TARDIS.

“Yeah, Disney don’t want me. Wanna hang?”

Five Doctor Who episodes to help you deal with grief

I’m writing this four days after my mother died.

It was one of those sudden, unexpected things: a phone call at five in the afternoon, the rain hammering on the roof of the folding camper as we laughed and giggled about nothing, and then the sudden, life-changing moment when you’re told the news, and then the denial (“No. No, no. You’re wrong“) and then…look. To be honest it’s a blur. But somehow things got done. And there was the inevitable back-and-forth between close family members and then we cancelled our day-old holiday and came back to deal with it. She had a heart attack despite having no history of heart trouble and that means a post mortem and a certain amount of limbo while you wait for the phone to ring.

It is a funny state of affairs. There is grieving without grieving. I think that, even after all this time, I am still in shock; a particularly lucid nightmare from which there is no chance to wake. You go onto autopilot: things happen because they must, and because the day needs to be traversed like some desolate, inexplicably familiar commute even though the circumstances are bizarre and frightening. It occurs to me that I have yet to cry about all this, and for once in my life the sense of overriding guilt that is my default emotional state is suddenly and notably absent, simply because I am keeping it at bay for fear that it would just about finish me off.

So I am currently fractured, and not in a good place, and when I’m not in a good place I tend to fall back on something creative. It’s that, or sit there and brood. For example, I have just rendered every single canonical Doctor in cartoon form using the Flipline Papa Louie Pals app; one of those random things you do when you’re waiting for the coffee to reach drinking temperature. I will post them here eventually, when I’ve sorted out the height variance. It seems almost frivolous, but it’s a way of getting through the day. No, it’s more than that: creativity is (and I dearly wish it weren’t) an outlet that is all too often fuelled by melancholy, where bad things lead to good things. In the (sometimes metaphorical) studio of every artist there is – or ought to be – a plaque reading “YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE MISERABLE TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS”.

Or perhaps it’s just a way of shutting out the noise. And it is a noise, this confusing maelstrom of mixed moods, of memories both bad and joyful and sometimes both, of things said and unsaid and this realisation that there is no such thing as a positive or negative emotion, there is only an emotion, and that it is possible to feel both good and bad. “The sun rose steadily over Hogwarts,” writes Rowling at the end of The Deathly Hallows, “and the Great Hall blazed with life and light. Harry was an indispensible part of the mingled outpourings of jubilation and mourning, of grief and celebration.” How wondrous it might have been if we had actually seen that at the end of the film, instead of the mute and oddly soulless calm that David Yates and Warner opted to provide.

But Doctor Who can be like that. At its best (and that is a heady height that is reached all too rarely, it seems) it provides both the opportunity to celebrate life and also to mark its end, as characters die and are appropriately mourned, and death is the next stage on a journey, or a sacrifice worth making, or perhaps as simple as going to bed at the end of a very long day. This list is not exhaustive; nor is it definitive. Certain ‘obvious’ stories (Father’s Day) are missing; other choices will possibly strike you as odd. That’s fine. These are, for one reason or another, the episodes that have helped me, curiously not by revisiting them (I simply haven’t had the time) but purely in terms of remembering key themes and moments and dialogue from years of watching and dissecting and writing about them. And this week, doing that has comforted me. And if anyone is feeling what I’ve been feeling, and can in turn draw any comfort from anything I’ve written, either here or below, then my work is surely not fruitless, nor meaningless.

And I miss my mum.

 

Twice Upon A Time

What would you do, muses Steven Moffat in this Christmas special, if you had the chance to say goodbye again? If the dead were somehow stored as permanent memories, magically rendered flesh through the conduit of a glass avatar? What would you say to them – if, indeed, you could be sure it was them? And how would you know? That’s the mystery that the Doctor endeavours to solve, with the help of a long-vanquished former self, a dead woman and a melancholy army captain whose time is apparently up. There are gags about French restaurants and there is a Dalek, but it’s that idea of loss and survival that lingers long after the smoke from the death ray has dissipated into the air. The notion that we might somehow be able to talk to the deceased – or, more specifically, that they might talk to us – is one that is embossed throughout ‘Twice Upon A Time’, holding it together like the stitching on David Bradley’s hat. The avatar on the battlefield is both Bill Potts and not Bill Potts; both Clara Oswald and not Clara Oswald, both Nardole and…well, you get the idea. In the end, it is the memories of others that make us who we are, and that as long as there is breath in our bodies, they never truly leave us.

 

The Woman Who Fell To Earth

Series 11 opens with the news of a death, only we don’t know that. Jodie Whittaker’s inauguration begins and more or less ends with a YouTube video, uploaded by a tearful young man mourning the loss of his grandmother. It is a grief that will eventually unite him with her second husband – a man who himself carries the weight of loss in his cancer-stricken body: a man with a broken heart living on borrowed time. And yet this is not in itself a bad thing. “I carry them with me,” says the Doctor, when asked how she copes with those she herself has lost. “What they would have thought and said and done. I make them a part of who I am.” It is a sentiment that will eventually save Graham, when faced (much later on) with the ghost of the woman he knew, and who is able to tell her apart from the real thing by remembering how she would have reacted. Still, it is always the Doctor who survives, and sometimes that hurts. And as good as it was, there was a sting to this particular tale when we re-examined its title: this notion that there were two women, both of whom had fallen to Earth, and that only one of them managed to get back on her feet.

 

Heaven Sent

Shaken and broken from the apparent death of his companion, Peter Capaldi’s Doctor is marooned inside a watch that looks like a castle, chased by a ghost that wouldn’t look out of place on Scooby Doo, and spends four billion years punching through a wall. On paper it sounds almost ridiculous. In practice it is a stunning, almost groundbreaking entry in the Who logbook, a Groundhog Day of endless grief. But it is the mood of this one that strikes you: a sombre, semi-lit world of browns and greys and dark reds, where corridors shift and paintings decay and one is both always alone and never alone. Clara is both the Doctor’s muse and the object of his grief, manifest in a cacophony of half-glimpses, viewed from behind as she scratches with chalk before vanishing once more into the shadows – the decision to eventually show her one of the few narrative missteps in an otherwise impeccable production. “It’s funny,” muses the Doctor, halfway through this story, drumming his fingers on the arm of a chair. “The day you lose someone isn’t the worst. At least you’ve got something to do. It’s all the days they stay dead.” The following week (and presumably requiring something else to do) he would bust Clara from the trap street and she would run off with Maisie Williams in a stolen TARDIS, but we’re not going to discuss that one.

 

The Rings of Akhaten

Poor Neil Cross went through the wringer with this, and it really isn’t fair. Yes, it is overly sentimental and frequently ridiculous. Yes, the the final conceit (in which, during what is a bizarre twist on The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Clara destroys the monster by feeding it a leaf) really doesn’t work. Yes, the singing is a bit much. On the other hand you would be hard-pressed to find an episode of Doctor Who that matches this one in terms of ambition, grandeur and sheer unbridled joy: a rejuvenated Doctor, fresh off his leash, a companion dazzled by the wonders of the universe, a beautifully rendered interstellar market and a dozen good ideas that never quite bear fruit. The Doctor’s graveside stalking of Clara is uncomfortable to watch – it’s rather like reading your girlfriend’s diary – but the whole pre-title sequence is a beautiful and ultimately heart-rending vignette that shows us how someone might be defined by the people close to them. ‘Akhaten’ is about letting go of the things we love, but it treads this path with that sense of bittersweet sadness and joy I was talking about; the one that pervades the closing moments of Harry Potter. And this in the episode where Matt Smith has a wand duel.

 

Blink

Viewed from one perspective, ‘Blink’ is a story about bootstraps and puzzles and the frightening things that lurk in old houses. That’s usually how I approach it, and I wouldn’t blame you for doing the same. But it’s so much more than that: it is, at its core, a story about loss, as Sally Sparrow – the undisputed queen of Companions That Never Were – has her heart broken twice, once by an old acquaintance and once by a new one. This would count for nothing if the script were mawkish and sentimental, but it is neither: ‘Blink’ is one of those stories that works just as well when it is being sad as when it is being frightening, and the death of Billy Shipton (announcing, with a poetic abstractness that would eventually outstay its welcome, that he would live “until the rain stops”) is among the most poignant scenes that Moffat has ever committed to paper. And it’s here, in these moments of downtime when the statues are off camera and the score is quiet and understated, that the paradox of the Weeping Angels is revealed: that the tragedy that trails in their wake is visited not upon those who are taken but on those that are left behind. The Doctor calls this potential energy; at the risk of sounding tremendously cloying, we might just as easily call it love.