We All Need a Doctor
Like many British kids I had a childhood love of Doctor Who (but fortunately not the pictured underpants). My main memories of the TV series are of the later Tom Baker and the Peter Davison eras (Davison was much underrated in my opinion - I have deep evokative memories of stories like Castrovalva, Enlightenment and Earthshock). Beyond the TV I used to while away the two hours after primary school before my mother finished work by sitting in the next-door library and gradually working my way through their entire Doctor Who collection. The impact on me was deep, and to this day I am moulded as much by the role model of The Doctor as by anything else (sometimes even down to the eccentric clothing).
Doctor Who on TV with Colin Baker at the helm gradually got sillier and siller (Bonnie Langford - were they kidding?!), and with Sylvester McCoy it took a dramatic nose-dive. Neither actor added much of interest over the characterisations of their predecessors. Such was my disillusionment that I gave the appearance of a 1996 telemovie no more than a second thought despite being quite a fan of Paul McGann.
Perhaps partly because of the success of the Battlestar Galactica reinvention I was tentatively positive on hearing the news that well-respected TV writer Russell T Davies was to bring Doctor Who back to the small screen after its 16 year absence. Christopher Eccleston as The Doctor seemed an exciting choice - his performances have always impressed - although I'll admit to having been a little nervous about Billie Piper as his companion.
Rose, the first episode of the new series, was leaked to the net a few weeks before being shown, and I leapt at the opportunity to see what a 21st century Who looks like. My initial reactions were a bit mixed, I was disappointed that it is still, to put it bluntly, a bit silly. As the series has progressed I've remembered that being a little kooky was always part of the unique charm of the show - after all what could be more kooky than having the time machine be a police telephone box? Apparently the choice was an improvisation to save costs - the box was lying around from a police drama - but actually turned out to be a timeless stroke of genius.
From the somewhat silly start the series picked up steam with some great effects in The End of the World, a classic Who historic piece in The Unquiet Dead, and reached dizzying heights of quality with the sublime 'Dalek' - feel sympathy for a Dalek, moi? Never! - through the beautifully emotive Father's Day, to the eerily compelling Empty Child. If I'm honest, the final flourish of Bad Wolf/The Parting of Ways was the smallest soupçon underwhelming, if only because expectations were running high. Still, the resolution of the Bad Wolf mystery and the appearance of David Tennant as the new Doctor were exciting, and though I'm sorry not to see where Eccleston could have taken his incarnation, I'm quietly enthusiastic about The Tenth Doctor.
The State Is Violence
When you have the strong arm of the law literally clutching your youthfully ethnic nepalese shirt and you look into the shaded depths of the menacing vaderesque helmet that conceals the face behind the thick black glove trying to drag you back behind police lines for what you can only imagine is going to be a stern kicking, the state starts to look a lot less like something that's on your side. When you see mounted officers intentionally charging through thick crowds of men, women and children; when you see a journalist's video camera deliberately smashed to pieces; when your continuing teenage naiveté has you running back towards a sea of black helmets marauding their way across open green fields and you attempt to hand a friendly solicitor's card to a truncheon's prey and suddenly find the business end of that same baton descending towards your face, you find yourself wondering about the myth of the 'friendly bobby' - briefly - before you lunge and run.
These were my experiences twelve years ago, on an anti-racism demo in Welling, south-east London, protesting against the presence of the neo-nazi BNP's headquarters in close proximity to the bus stop where 16-year old Stephen Lawrence was murdered. It was an almost entirely peaceful demonstration of around a hundred thousand who'd come to express their outrage at the flagrant racial hatred incited by this loathsome grouping. The menacingly impersonal riot police were out in force from the outset - despite later TV news reports to the contrary - and they very quickly deployed a pincer movement that had those of us near the front crushed so badly people were screaming and climbing up a steep embankment to escape.
I've been remembering those events because of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian at Stockwell underground station in south London. He lived in a block of flats in Tulse Hill, as did I four years ago. I can picture the walk past Brixton station - closed because of the previous Thursday's explosions - up Stockwell Road past the skaters and up to the station. What would I do if confronted by several non-uniformed heavies on the way. I might run, depending on my state of mind. If I was a non-native, and my English wasn't so good, I could well run. If I had an expired visa I might definitely run. Whatever happened this is a tragic killing, and a firm example of the violent force that is the state.
Now I'm not indifferent to the difficulty the threat of suicide bombers poses to the London Met. Personally, and - I admit - utterly simplistically, I think the best way to stop people wanting to kill us is to stop killing others. Yes, there's a lot more to the situation but right now I don't intend to go any deeper than that. I abhor the violence the US and its friends inflict on the rest of the world, and I abhor the violence of the counterattacks. I also abhor the hypocrisy of seeing the former as legitimate and restrained and the latter as evil and unscrupulous. In truth US military campaigns have little of the restrained or moderate about them.
The link between the death of de Menezes and my experience is simply this: the state is violence. It's easy to forget that the origins of the modern state are in the warrior kings of the dark ages who were simply the biggest and nastiest bullies in their areas, and thus able to establish hegemonies. We like to believe that our modern democratic states serve the interests of the people, but their real purpose is self-perpetuation through violent oppression. It takes a harsh reality like the cold-blooded murder of an innocent to tear away the veneer and expose the vicious core.
Why Do You Stay Up So Late?
Why Do You Stay Up So Late?: beautiful (requires flash, via boingboing)
