Dear Steven,

Women eh? Who are they and what do they want? This was the conundrum that bedevilled Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As an author he made an imaginative leap that seems misjudged to this day. He dared to suggest that women were, to all intents and purposes, people too. To our eyes, as to those sunk in Victorian faces, females appeared slight, inconsequential creatures. They were little more than adjuncts to male sexuality and so of course, it remains. What separated them from men, those fully paid up members of the human race, was their soft intellect. Conan Doyle understood that women, though a feast for the eyes, were a hunger strike for the mind. Who could talk to them? Their obsession with whimsy and superficial toss, their odious materialism, their fixation on beauty, their lack of common sense; what a necropolis for substance!

Doyle knew that women made life a misery for the industrious half of the species and that’s why his hero, Sherlock Holmes, was blissfully unburdened by romantic entanglements. The author understood, as his readers did, that if Holmes were to succumb to the tyranny of romantic infatuation, if he allowed himself to be co-opted into madness by the animalistic imperative, then his masculine intellect, built on reason, clarity and the kind of self-confidence that you get straight out of the box when your penis is delivered, would be fatally compromised.

To underline this point he created, in A Scandal in Bohemia, a cautionary foe for the great detective, Irene Adler. Adler, who Doyle told us had “the face of the most beautiful of women” but also a male learning engine under the hood, was a Columbo prototype; she looked foolish, on account of her appearance, but her wits were weaponised.

I imagine that when you read the original story you shared readers’ concerns about Adler’s masculine abilities, despite being conscious of Doyle’s satirical intent. With no other advantages, we’d expect a lady character to use her femininity’s retarding effect on the male mind to give her the edge. What man, even Sherlock Holmes, could resist a pretty face, a well-apportioned chest and a bountiful rear, right? This has been the kryptonite of progress for generations. So yes, like us Steven, you read the original text and were befuddled. You thought this a joke too far.

I imagine Strand readers of 1891 shared your shock that Adler triumphed over the great detective using her brain. She wasn’t a damsel in distress, Holmes didn’t get to save her and she didn’t use her beauty to distract him – he saw her as nothing more than an actor in his latest case; no, when it came to it she simply outthought him and was gone before the pipe puffing genius knew what had happened. Conan Doyle created the female intellect for gawd sakes! Clearly you read the story and thought, like many Victorian conceits, how fanciful it seemed. I can therefore understand your decision to change it for this 21^st century update.

It takes real bravery to mark up the shortcomings of a legendary scribe like Conan Doyle. I applaud you for refusing to play it safe. Your version of Adler made more sense to me, and I suspect to most of the 2012 audience. ‘Twas quite a wheeze, literalising the only thing we really knew about her, that she beat the men in her life, turning it into her profession. She’s a dominatrix! Naysayers, who like to tie their tackle to the feminist flagpole, will say this was only superficial smarts on your part. Sure, they’ll bleat, it gave “the woman” a modern pretext for procuring blackmail material while having a little fun with the character’s raison d’être, but it also relegated her to the status of a calculating prick tease. She’s still a brain but one that’s now using her sex to stay on top; her intellect, like a grateful sidecar passenger, invited to enjoy the ride. Brains is the new sexy, indeed!

Still relax, Steven. No matter how backward this seemed to some, I was fully on board. The new Adler was a woman I could understand. Her power came from her sexual yield. She was so conscious of this that she used her measurements as her safe’s password combination. It showed real masculine cunning to recast the character’s intellect as feminine complete with corresponding flaws. I hyenaed as I considered the millions of female viewers who’d be enamoured by this boisterous belle; you’d made them the perfect proxy. She was sassy but lost unless she was a sex object. The ladies would see her as strong character, though we knew her to be weak: a woman utterly reliant on male patronage for sufficiency. In a society where the ladies objectify themselves to get on then tell themselves that’s independence, it was biting social commentary indeed. Better yet the fems that love the show but are unable or unwilling to extricate themselves from this feminine fallacy would love you for making Irene a seductress. You reasserted the male primacy that Conan Doyle had so carelessly ceded 120 years ago.

This Adler not only failed to beat Sherlock but, in a reassuring twist, was ultimately felled by her own feminine emotions. Let’s face it, she only got as far as she did with the help of your camp and juvenile Moriarty. She may have been a match for Holmes on paper, but when it came to the crunch she had no answer to the question his masculine logic posed. The final rug pulling moment, with Holmes saving Adler from death, saw the familiar pattern of gender relations fully restored. What a flourish, Steven! Purists won’t like it but I suspect that Arthur would have been quietly relieved. He knu he’d dun a bad.

As to the rest, I thought you did a reasonable job refurbishing Doyle’s story. With most of Europe having had sufficient nous to dismantle their monarchies and go for full democracy, it made sense to move the Royal portion closer to home. It was an enjoyable and necessary reminder that we remain a naïve and immature nation enamoured with fairytales about Prince and Princesses. Sherlock could have made the point that the real scandal was that the British people had a Royal Family at all, not that they’d care about their sexual proclivities, but it hardly needed saying. We know they’re all degenerates anyway, Steven; the shock would be to find out that they weren’t having every orifice plugged by ladies dressed as SS officers, at the taxpayer’s expense.

If the plot felt less assured when you ran out of source material (terrorist cells, the plane full of dead people from the movie Millennium), so what? I enjoyed the sharp one liners and Paul McGuigan’s direction; his style, the roving eye, is a good match for the detective’s method; though not the bromance, which though harmless enough, is fast becoming a bit of a Holmesian myth. Look, I know this is an update, and we’re all far less repressed these days, but it seems to me that any notion of Holmes and Watson as a couple misunderstands the dynamic of their relationship.

Theirs is a friendship built upon mutual respect and, in Watson’s case, intellectual curiosity. Watson was married at the start of A Scandal in Bohemia, so it’s fair to say that Sherlock wasn’t filling in as life partner, sub-consciously or not. I know audiences love this stuff – the Guy Ritchie movies are built on it – but between you and me, I find it rather tedious. Holmes and Watson are not in love, anymore than Holmes was in love with Irene Adler. He admires them both for their unique qualities, venerates them certainly, but love? That’s a stretch. Add elements by all means, Steven – update attitudes and situations, but don’t presume you know these characters better than Conan Doy- no wait, hang on…

Sincerely,

Ed

The party’s over my friend: 2011, the year we looked forward to for two thousand and ten years, is over. It was alright, wasn’t it? Not the unbroken period of wealth, sexual exploration and skytram rides that we were promised in the 1930s, but not quite a busted flush.

For me it began with a blog post much like this one; reading it back, making corrections, inserting the odd rude word. While never inducing orgasmic convulsions, the year wasn’t unkind to me. I remained alive (thanks 2011!), sheltered and gainfully employed. I tasted the life of a man with no imagination, with nothing to do but consume and acquire material goods. It was empty, a spiritual haemorrhage, but comfortable. I enter 2012, assuming I make it to midnight, bolstered by anticipation. There’s much uncertainty, many balls are in the air – they’re on fire, and much could change in the next 12 months. I can’t be sure what’s going to happen and I find that quietly exciting.

Despite the lack of achievement and activity in this globally turbulent year, I took some time out from visiting places and doing things to allow ideas about the future and the work that may be produced in it, to cohere. I put out lots of nonsensical toss like this. Mainly, this distracted me from the tasks that were proving more challenging but it also kept me in the habit of writing. Alright, this may be throwaway stuff but even tat can be collectable; some people make a hobby out of it y’know. Start archiving these posts now and who knows what they’ll be worth in thirty years. Nothing, you say? Well that, dear reader, is why you’ll always be on the outside looking in; no vision you see.

My hobby horse, film criticism, picked up in 2011. I’m not bored of it yet. I managed to get myself on Rotten Tomatoes and found a large audience who were only too happy to tell me what an imperious, wrongheaded fuckface I was. Honestly, is it my fault if I’m right all the bloody time? Still, I’ve enjoyed getting the word out and arguing the toss with angry cinema goers. That I’m better at the job than 96.2% of those out there and still largely unwaged for my efforts, does nothing for my sense of natural justice. Still, when we’re all that quintessence of dust that Shakespeare talked about and all the money we’ve earned in our lifetime counts for dick sizzle, all that will remain are the words. I’m happy with that, it’s those that will have cock all to show for their time on Planet Earth that should be concerned.

So yes, my beautiful blogheads, I wish you a wonderful 2012 and thank you from the pit of my sack for reading Is That All There Is in 2011. You did me proud. I knew you would.

Below are my favourite blogs from the past 12 months. I’ve arranged them into little themed clusters. Don’t worry, my loyal but disgruntled troupe, it’s only going to get better next year.

Good luck to us all in the big twelve and twenty.

2011 in blogs:

The Way We Live Now

• Motorists and murder
• Film Spectatorship
• New strategies for begging

Inspired by the news

• The true story behind the creation of Ed Balls and Miliband
• The London Riots
• The real reason the News of the World had to close
• Pies and student politics

Culture and the Arts

• The most complicated music ever written and John Barry’s tribute concert
• When radio sitcom met art
• The up and comers on the comedy circuit

Dear Bryan,

Earlier this year I was upset to learn that Pat Evans, an EastEnders institution, was to be closed after 168 years. All your viewers adore Pat; she’s the former prostitute and Grandmother we never had. I look at the folds in Pat’s puss and I’m reminded of nature’s bounty and time’s beneficence to my baby blues. I never felt I deserved Pat and now, as if to confirm that thesis, you’re taking her away. SORT OF.

I understand that Pam St Clement, one of the few people not to play herself on the show, is tired and wants to step away from the role after 25 years. It can’t be easy for a well spoken lesbian to devolve her speech and pretend to be sexually attracted to hulking hairy cavemen with ugly groin protuberances. All those scenes with Mike Reid must have disgusted her. It would have been difficult enough for a heterosexual woman. Pam’s suffered for her art and our cheap entertainment. Understandably you don’t want to lose an asset like that just yet, but your solution beggars belief. It might just be the most desperate conceit ever inflicted on the British public.

I first learned of the Pat Swap plot yesterday afternoon. I got a call from a friend who hangs loose in showbiz circles. She knows a man who knows a woman who once slept with Winston from the market and word trickled down after a member of the cast, who I won’t name to protect their job (Shane Richie), left a script open on the bar of the Queen Vic while extras rehearsed pretending to have a silent conversation.

Bryan, the entire plot is absurd. I’ve dealt with all sorts in my EastEnders viewing career, but this story doesn’t ask me to suspend my disbelief, so much as sack it. In scenes to be broadcast on New Year’s Day, you actually intend to introduce a new family, the Morlocks, who move in next door to the Butchers and who, it just so happens, have a dying, rotund matriarch, with an uncanny resemblance to our beloved Pat.

That would be hard enough to swallow but then, in a sequence of events that’s going to astound the nation, and not in a good way, you intend to show poor Ricky Butcher, a character already dumb as a rubber knife, coming home to find our favourite dispenser of home truths dead in her boudoir. Ricky, I understand, unable to revive Pat, panics, and rather than dial 999 (he can’t call the local G.P as he burnt to death on Christmas Day), hauls Pat’s hulken mass out onto the front porch, screaming for help. Having received none, because the other characters are too blind drunk on cheap whisky and crack, he flutters about in despair only to be stopped dead at the sight of the new Pat-a-like, lying pale, covered in a blanket and surrounded by packing boxes in the Morlock’s new front room.

Now this is the moment that EastEnders, in my view Bryan, jumps the jellied eel.

Ricky, doped up on grief, has a mini-nervous breakdown. He climbs through the part-open window of the Morlock’s house, the others no where to be seen, strokes Grandma Morlock’s face and says “Pat, it’s you innit, you’re not really dead. Nah, nah, you’re not dead.” Next thing we know Bryan, we’re watching Ricky put this uncanny look-a-like into Pat’s bed only to cut to a horrific scene with the Morlocks returning from their New Year’s drinks at the Vic only to discover the woman they think is the head of the family, dead on the sofa.

I’ve just got one question for you, Bryan; do you seriously expect anyone to believe this shit?

I can’t tell you how insulted I am, especially as a life long fan, to be treated with such unmitigated contempt by you and your writers. One only has to think about this storyline for a few seconds to realise that the problems just pile up.

Do you really expect us to buy into the idea that the Morlocks wouldn’t instantly recognise that it was a different woman? Alright, you’ve cast her to look a lot like Pat, from her build to her crumpled frontispiece to those earrings, but even so, they’ve known this woman all their lives! Of course they’d work it out! Then there’s the Butchers. What happens on January 2^nd when Grandma Morlock opens her mouth? Alright, according to my source she has advanced dementia so is soon convinced by Ricky that she is in fact her deceased neighbour, and fine, you’ve written a scene where Ricky explains to his family that Pat had a mini-stroke in the night that had a detrimental impact on her speech, height and ability to recognise her friends and family, but even a dead head like Bianca would see through that, surely? Tiffany’s sharp as an axe, she’s going to pull this shit apart in five minutes.

I’ve also learned that you intend to keep the plot running for a year. A year! Are you fucking mad? If this is a means of giving us all a soft landing – a way to cope with our grief at Pat’s departure, then you’ve badly misjudged your audience, Bryan.

As a life long fan of the show I’m begging you to reconsider this story. It’s not too late to shoot some emergency scenes, maybe bring back Poppy Meadow for a few weeks; just her talking to the rest of the cast about boys and makeup, while you film new footage to cover the fallout from Pat’s death. A story like the Pat Swap could break this show, Bryan. It could be the end. Think of the offence it’s going to cause to people who don’t watch the programme but have elderly relatives dying of cancer. Think about the older viewers with parents that have dementia who will learn about it in the Daily Mail about a week from now. You’ll get a million complaints, you cockend, don’t do it.

I love Pat and I’m going to miss her but I want a dignified ending for the character. Not this, Bryan. It mustn’t end like this.

Yours four times a week, not that you deserve it,

Ed

Dear Steven,

I hope you’re having a pleasant Yule. It can’t be bad, sitting down with your family to watch your handiwork broadcast throughout the land. I’ve recently started to produce and direct artistic, high quality pornographic films and it’s my hope that one day I can sit down with the fair Mrs Whitfield and our children, Masmouder and Punch, and enjoy the likes of I wanna hold your gland and Cleft and Wright. A pipe dream perhaps but…

I’ve now finished digesting your seasonal slab of Gallifreyan ganglinoid action, The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe and can I just say how refreshing it was to see C.S Lewis made over sans Christianity. It was an omission that perfectly captured the spirit of the season and immeasurably improved the material. In place of a furry Christ we had an all-together more enjoyable metaphor, a mother ship. This was the greatest visual pun since John Simm’s Master Race, and although you built your story around it, just as your predecessor Russell Dust did with his, in The End of Time, when he realised it could be both a play on words AND a plot device, your conceit worked better, primarily because it didn’t involve a multiplicity of Simms.

Alright, it was all a little saccharine and inconsequential, and you do love your modern idioms, no matter when the bastard is set (“this will be the best Christmas ever!”) but you stuffed this bird with plenty of good humour and inventive fuckery. I enjoyed Claire Skinner’s undercutting of Smith’s hyperactive shtick, “that man is quite ridiculous”, and lines like, “he’s turning your brother into a lifeboat”; something you won’t hear on any other show, and not just because it would violate the BBC’s copyright.

I won’t lie Steven, because you’d see through it of course; I was a little bored. I’m jaded and childless so I don’t feel any warmth watching parables about kids that open their Christmas presents too early, nor do I punch the air when Mum arrives to save her saplings. The mother inadvertently saving her pilot husband from death and returning him to his two strongest ejaculations was pure 50′s Hollywood, and a nice scene for Christmas Day, but I worried that all the kids watching with Mother, whose Dads were off fighting Hitler over the channel, would be given a ray of false hope. Those men have been gone a long time now; I don’t think they’re coming home.

The real reason to watch this guff was, naturally, to get to the final scene where perennial plotting was put to one side and we got our one bona fide series moment; the reunion of The Doctor and Amy. I think I saw Rory in the background too. My loins nearly had a heart attack when that Scottish beauty opened the door with her bubble gun. There they were, together again, and one wondered why you couldn’t leave them to it and let them enjoy the occasional reunion, rather than ruining my TV girlfriend’s life in the next series. I know, she’s a major character and must have a dramatic conclusion to her story but isn’t there some way she could simply leave Rory and her strange child, some twenty years her senior, and come to live with me, perhaps in a Notting Hill townhouse where we could live like Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg in Performance?

Yeah, you won’t do THAT for me, will you, ya bastard?

The responsibility that comes with festive specials

We wage slaves are simple people, Steven, who can’t hope to understand the rigors of producing an hour of Christmas Day television for a demanding, seen-it-all-before viewership, who look at the finished product and imagine it was as easy to write as it was to watch.

Morecambe and Wise spent half the year impotent, laden with sexual and psychological dysfunction, over active thyroids, groin sweats and subnormal, violent episodes, producing each year’s yuletide hour. We now know, courtesy of a BBC light entertainment whistleblower, that Eric and Ernie used to sit by the phone with a cyanide pill between their teeth, waiting for a call from the duty office and the report that summarised overnight reaction from viewers. If they’d brought us sunshine they could live, if we thought it okay, about as good as The Two Ronnies, they’d bite down. We can thank some creative lying for their longevity.

I’m not suggesting you’re under that sort of pressure, Steven, but you must worry that the BBC, in deliberately filling the festive schedule with repeats, terrible films, underwritten sitcoms, miserablist soap and Blackadder the Third transmitted in the wrong aspect ratio, in order to create a bountiful stock of goodwill and indeed, hope, for you to mine, have left you dangerously exposed.

If your episode is good then this strategy, known as the jewel in the dung gambit, ensures reviews laden with superlatives and twitter users drunk with relief, but if it’s poor, you’ve ruined Christmas for the nation’s children; you’re the Father that got drunk after dinner and announced his intension to leave his wife and kids over the crackers and mince pies.

Perhaps you’re not sent a memo sometime around the end of August, requesting that the episode be upbeat, celebrate festive values as they’re imagined to be and end on a mawkish note; after all you’d be acutely aware of the BBC’s expectations. However, given the show’s popularity, and indeed your, one imagines, unassailable position as Emperor Dalek, could you not, y’know, use your privileged position and access to the nation’s youth, to drop a satire bomb on the country’s attempts at making this appalling, contrived family festival of consumption pass like a fairytale?

I for one would be grateful. Millions would cheer. Christmas TV became ossified long ago. It’s so bland and formulaic. Why not use a programme like Doctor Who to piss on that turkey dinner and pop a fenugreek leaf into Uncle Silas’ mulled wine? The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe felt like having a funnel forced into my mouth and Christmas poured into it until it overflowed. I choked on the sentiment. Here are three things you could have done instead:

1. A story about a fundamentalist Santa who gradually succumbs to guilt about the culture of festive decadence he’s created and so delivers bombs instead of gifts to the world’s children. The Doctor attempts to stop him but thinks better of it when he too becomes disillusioned with the institutionalised greed he sees all around him; the story climaxing with a global cascade of house fires.

2. A story in which The Doctor and Amy visit Christ as a youth and conclude that rather than being the son of God, he is in fact a mentally ill teenager. They resolve to remove him from the historical record and build an alternative winter solstice celebration centred on the birth of their own fictional character that champions promiscuity and lewd poetry throughout December.

3. A story in which The Doctor spends the weekend with Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. Succumbing to Victoria’s overtures, he breaks Albert’s heart, effectively killing his Christmas spirit and changing history so now, rather than introduce Christmas Trees, the Royal Consort convinces the Queen to cancel the entire thing, which she does, resulting in a December 25^th where no one feels obliged to be cheerful, spend time with awful relatives or eat the same fucking food as everyone else in the country. The real message of the episode, however, would be that TV would improve immeasurably and this would be the great insight that a grateful nation would remember you for.

You may use any of those for next year’s special.

Yours in time and festive cyberspace,

Ed

Letters from the last series:

• Dear Steven Moffat: The Wedding of River Song
• Dear Steven Moffat: Closing Time 
• Dear Steven Moffat: The God Complex
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Girl Who Waited
• Dear Steven Moffat: Night Terrors
• Dear Steven Moffat: Let’s Kill Hitler 
• Dear Steven Moffat: A Good Man Goes to War
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Almost People
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Rebel Flesh
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Doctor’s Wife
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Curse of the Black Spot
• Dear Steven Moffat: Day of the Moon
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Impossible Astronaut 

Christopher Hitchens, who died on Thursday, has, rightly I think, been remembered as an important thinker with a keen intellect and gift for wordcraft. The obituaries outlined the force of his personality and the zeal with which he demolished charlatans and hypocrites. Better still, his refusal to reach for crutches like sentimentality, whimsy and received wisdom when discussing politics, art and religion, gave us cause to believe that the battle of ideas hasn’t been lost just yet.

Hitchens was an iconoclast and rationalist (or a Godless contrarian if you’re simple). Consequently, anyone writing about the man following his death would be disrespectful if they failed to evaluate his life and achievements with anything other than sobriety: not easy when writing about an unrepentant alcoholic. Hitchens, when writing obituaries, was famously unmoved by the fact of the subject’s death, never allowing the piece that followed to be corrupted by romanticism. If the individual had been a grotesque in life, he thought, then the piece should discuss their minus contribution to the sum total of human progress, uncowed by the sympathy and proxy fear we all feel when someone goes ahead of us into eternal nothingness.

In accessing him, most obituary writers eschewed Hitch style character demolition and worldview dissection, in favour of an honest summary of his contribution to journalism; a considerable contribution that saw him posthumously grouped as an essayist with the likes of George Orwell. It’s not an invidious comparison.

Many resisted political readings of his life, being content to document the, for some, inexplicable truth, that he held views belonging to both the left and right. Okay, this may be true for every human being on Earth, but Hitchens, whose pragmatism allowed him to slip out of an ideological straightjacket, was hated by many on the left for that relativist instinct. That it was informed by a mind that targeted the complexities and vicissitudes of each situation, however inconvenient, was incidental to those that didn’t care to bear down on the facts quite so hard.

Still, in the days following his death, his enemies, comprehensively beaten in life, had the good grace to remain silent, while his admirers kept hyperbole to a minimum, often quoting their subject in depth; he was permitted to speak for himself. In fact, all in the land of remembrance was well until the Independent columnist Viv Groskop thought she saw a chasm sized flaw in the obituary writers’ logic and moved to fill it: Hitchens may have been a great man but what about the great woman behind him? Wasn’t anyone going to credit Carol Blue, his wife, for her part in the man’s prestigious output?

You might think the short answer to that is no; Blue, no doubt a fine companion for the late writer, wasn’t responsible for his intellectual curiosity, his early drive, his political awakening, his fastidiousness or, and this is quite important, a single word of any essay or piece of prose written by him in his lifetime. At first glance, if one were to extract Blue from the scene, Hitchens would have been no less a successful journalist and writer, but hold the fuck on, says Groskop, we, like so many of Christopher’s detractors, are missing the bigger picture. She was there to mother him and that made all the difference, or something. I mean, it’s almost impossible to evaluate but it’s obvious, innit.

Our society’s numerous problems are offset using intangible covers ups; ideas that don’t quite have weight, form, indeed any kind of substance, but nevertheless provide reassurance; ideas that function to relieve us of the burden of having to think too closely about the root causes of certain difficulties. They’re terribly convenient because they explain away the everyday without recourse to time consuming trials like scrutiny, investigative thought and imagination. You and I know these fragments from a netherworld of bullshit, built from psychical bungaroosh, as truisms, a.k.a received wisdom; the sort of nonsense that Hitchens hated but is now, post-mortem, being used to retrospectively re-shape his life’s narrative by Viv Groskop.

Gender inequality is one of the scourges of our age; the only people who don’t think so are men that fear a feminised world. Women, it seems to me, have a choice; they can either accept they’re down and are achieving less, on average, and turn militant in a bid to emancipate themselves and challenge the existing patriarchy or they can try to feel better about male dominance with comforting lies like “behind every great man lies a great woman”.

In addition to being a thought terminating cliché, Groskop’s thesis, that Hitchens’ wife managed and tolerated his difficult persona plus a work ethnic “close to lunacy”, selflessly putting her own needs aside so he could work unimpeded, is disingenuous, not to mention a flight of fancy. Her evidence is a quote from Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who noted that Blue “set a high bar in how to handle a flower like Christopher”. That’s one way of looking of it. Another is to say that Blue was lucky to be married to a man as interesting as Hitchens.

If we’re allowing our gender and imagination to intertwine and inform speculation, couldn’t we just as plausibly argue that Blue got more from spending her life with Hitchens than the reverse? “Most of the obituaries don’t mention her at all,” laments Groskop; clinical assessments of a dead man’s achievements that eschewed the domestic, the trivial, the sexual; what an embarrassment of relevance. No wonder Viv was bemused.

Groskop went on to cite Natalia Svetlova, wife of Solzhenitsyn, who answered the telephone on his behalf because he refused to do so. By indulging his reclusive tendency and allowing him to work uninterrupted, Svetlova, in Groskop’s mind, can take much of the credit for the literary leviathan’s oeuvre. “Imagine if that were your husband,” she says, appealing to the dutiful and economically inactive partner in us all, but Viv, we reply, if we’re lucky enough to be shackled to a genius we wouldn’t worry. Those of us that want a simple life have a million middling, bland people to choose from.

Groskop’s article, “Behind every Christopher Hitchens…”, though she could just have easily have gone for broke and entitled it, “the power behind the throne”, dangerously assumed that complicated people who are gifted in some way, always benefit from having a less complicated, less gifted partner in tow. Perhaps they do in the sense that it relieves them of the tedium that comes with an ordinary life; answering the phone, going to your kid’s parents evening, walking Shep; but as far as posterity’s concerned, this is an irrelevant sideshow.

Not one of Hitchens’ obituaries praised the role of his liver in keeping him alive during his lifetime of excess; no one heralded his fingers for depressing the keys on his typewriter. Perhaps Groskop’s editor cut those passages for space. And what of the reality that Groskop neither acknowledged nor considered? Isn’t it true that in many cases, your better half is a break on your ambition, not its facilitator?

If we’re to entertain the notion, buoyed by reams of anecdotal evidence, that men, and indeed women, are held back by poor partners; the kind that saddle them with responsibilities they don’t want, stunt their ambition with derision borne of envy or competition, and bully them into conforming to an imaginary archetype that cripples rather than compliments their personality; might we not agree that successful people may make an impact despite their love-squeeze, not because of them? Doesn’t it denigrate a person’s achievements to have them rooted in and ascribed to, the back room efforts of a less gifted fuckmate?

Hitchens credited alcohol as being his friend and sponsor. So why didn’t the Indy run a piece praising Johnny Walker Black Label as an integral part of his success? Most of the obituaries didn’t mention the brand at all. Probably because such a link wouldn’t make the vaginally endowed columnist feel better about the fact that there’s few female polemicists to match the deceased.

“Man cannot live by genius alone. So please, obituary writers, don’t let’s pretend he did”, concludes Groskop. Well Viv, I say let’s not pretend he didn’t succeed despite all of the nonsense that life puts in your way, or indeed that his achievements weren’t his own, however comforting it may be to assume otherwise.

Ladies: The author remains available for dates. Do get in touch.

The author makes no apologies for the metropolitan bias in the following blog post.

NIMBYs are the enemies of progress. They’re boorish, sentimental, parochial minded luddites but that’s not all; they’re also some of the most selfish people alive.

I’d dearly love to indulge in the kind of short sighted protectionism enjoyed by these closeted figurines, but I don’t have that luxury; I’m a descendent of the industrial revolution and technological progress. As a Londoner I also live in a real place; the kind of culturally rich, busy metropolitan centre, flush with humanity, where tolerance and a willingness to flex to accommodate one’s fellow citizens, of the kind already demonstrated, is a copper bottomed necessity.

I know you think you live in a real place but you don’t. Those six streets, flanked by pastoral beauty and evocative of 18^th century village life, are a romantic stain from a social dalliance long ended. I know, it’s nice for you to live in the village, with the old post office, red phone box, thatched public house and rows of lime plaster cottages; a place where you can hear nothing but Ravens and Cow bleats; where you’ve known the same ten people all your life, having slept with half of them; but this isn’t reality, it’s Britain as imagined by Hergé in the Tintin books.

To modernity’s eyes you’re cavemen. Worse, you’re lecturing us on the infrastructure projects conceived in the national interest. Worse still, the government is listening. This is ludicrous; like all adults agreeing to abstinence because a committee of five year olds told them that women and men touching each other was disgusting. Don’t misunderstand, I don’t wish to be condescending, it’s just that you’re a lot of backward, pig-ignorant bastards.

NIMBYs are lobbying hard to destroy belated attempts at improving our national rail network. The Victorians and Edwardians built it; it was the envy of the world. Sure, no one asked the world but someone who’d travelled around it spoke to someone who knew for definite. The railways connected communities, built many more, allowed industry and exploitation in the workplace to thrive and then, in the 1960s, technocrats, spearheaded by imbecilic, self-centred road users, like Doctor Beeching, dismantled a third of them and left the rest to rust. The Major regime finished it off, privatising the whole thing.

Now we’re ghouls riding the ghost train. Lost souls rotting in overcrowded, snail powered carriages. We cry out for investment, for modernisation, and when it finally comes in the form of the proposed HS2 link between London and Birmingham, a modest proposal to be sure, given the vast expansion and improvement required, the road lobby, holed up in a Chilterns country pile, cry foul. Do we realise that this line will destroy a field? Maybe even cut the walk cherished by Mary and Donald Westcott and their Shetland Sheepdog Jesse, in two? Yes, we know it, but those of us who see the bigger picture think it’s a price worth paying. We think this because we live in the modern world, not the novel Silas Marner.

Londoners make accommodations for each other every day. We’re constantly under each other’s feet; the transport network buckles and often breaks; and any space that isn’t accounted for is often co-opted for building projects; much needed new homes, a new rail link.

When Crossrail, the East to West railway, began construction, many restaurants and old clubs on Tottenham Court Road had to be destroyed because fresh track requires an expanded station. I had many happy memories of the buildings that got the wrecking ball but I didn’t stand there and weep into a book of old photographs or chain myself to The Mean Fiddler. Why? Well, I’d have been killed, but also because as a Londoner I understand that change and expansion is part of life and more importantly, that the city needs new arteries. If Londoners were as selfish and sentimental as those sitting in a damp farmhouse in ten acres of unspoilt marshland, somewhere north of the M25, then the entire system would grind to a halt. We get it and it’s about time you bastards caught up.

What’s true for London is true for the country. The transport system is hopelessly inadequate for the passenger numbers it carries. Journey times between major destinations are slow and major metropolitan centres must be served. The current lines can only be improved so much. The network must be expanded. We have to get moving. It can’t wait.

The plans are modest; too modest. If anything those High Speed lines should run from London to Glasgow; from London to Penzance. It’s not just green, if you care about that sort of thing, it also makes the country smaller; it pumps money from South to North and South to South West; it makes it possible for people to live in one city and work in another, meaning we don’t all have to live in the same overcrowded clumps. We can spread out a bit. We desperately need to spread out a bit.

I don’t want to be petty about this, but if the NIMBYs are going to scupper even the most half-hearted improvements, then reciprocal inconvenience should be vested upon them. I don’t have a real back yard; I gave it up, like most Londoners, so that one more person could enjoy the same benefits I do; the same museums, the same theatres, the same cinemas and pubs and restaurants; but what I do have is the symbolic equivalent, personal spheres of interest. Ideally, I’d want to stop any rural romantics intruding upon them, out of nothing but spite.

London’s a busy place so I’d decree that none of you could come here; not to work – you can piss off to the Chicken Factory like your school mates, and certainly not to enjoy any aspect of city life; that’s right you can forget that day trip to see your favourite band; instead you can stay at home and enjoy Annie Love singing the hits of Celine Dion at The Horse and Hoof. Enjoy theatre? Then you’ll love the Upper Horsham Players; that’s the local publican, his reluctant son and Mary from the pottery shop on Church Street; I believe they’re doing Sleuth at the old barn. Mary’s playing the furniture.

Meanwhile, because cars aren’t conducive to clean city living; we hardly need them in London given all these trains, buses and bikes; we should aggressively tax road users until their wallets scream, ignoring the needs of those in rural areas completely. Oh, you’re dependent upon your car to get around are you? Well that’s tough testicles. You should have thought of that before you opposed the changes that would improve the nation with a modern transport network.

Yes, you can look forward to fuel price hikes, road tax that you won’t be able to pay should you have any ambitions to feed and clothe your children, and, in a mirror of what your narrow mindedness has imposed on the train user, inflation busting increases on the price of a car itself. That’s right, a new wagon will be out of the question. Consequently you’ll have to put up with your old king sized roller skate until it’s little more than a mobile rusticle; a relic that it’s going to cost you the Earth to run. If you want a vision of the future I suggest you take your holidays in Cuba this year. We’ll see how nostalgic you are when you no longer have the means to modernise.

Sorry old fruits, but you didn’t expect us to subsidise paradise forever, while our lives ground to a halt, did you?

Oh. Anyway, as you were.

Oh, to be young, intellectual and liberal in the tens! That’s the dream. Life’s such a trudge; it spills over with boorish backsides who get off on filling their heads and days with mediocrity. The only escape from deadened senses is the North London media scene; venues that admit stylised humanity; seminars to celebrate this acceptable form of uniformity, reimagined as militant individualism.

It’s called slipstreaming; positioning yourself in a wake of lifestyle vomit, hoping to become interesting by association.  It’s like participating in a platform game in which you collect affectations for power ups. As a dullard with no personality to speak of,  desperate for veneration from the kind of people I aspire to be, I can’t get enough of it. Events I’ve attended in the last six months include a chance to shoot misandrist pornography, “Ironocaust” – a meet up for liberals who’d like to articulate their class and social prejudices in a safe environment, though on the strict understanding it’s ironic (saving everyone’s blushes and social standing), “Wet Throat” – an obscure wine and beer night, where bespectacled quaffers trade notes on alcoholic drinks that they now consider to be an extension of their personality, and a date night for men who’d like to meet quirky fems with up to ten niche interests; interests they say detract from any underlying mental health problems that may have hindered their chance of finding love in the past. Oh, and there’s been comedy…

Alternative comedy, in its modern incarnation, rejects society’s deadening preoccupations; I refer to consumerism and domesticity; just as the classic version dispensed with misogyny and racism (see Trevor Griffith’s play, The Comedians for a primer on the old divide). But comedy connoisseurs mustn’t fool themselves; their mirth merchants are conspicuously consumed.

Alternative comedy was and is about turning self-absorption into art. Ironic you may think, as it rallied against the atomisation of society. Life’s discontents, you see, fear nothing more than being average. The amorphous mass with its soaps, celebrity magazines and football (all name checked at ACMS), disgusts and terrifies them in equal measure. Being content to be anonymous and ordinary is hardly living is it? It’s just one step up from being a goldfish.

These anomic creatives, who can’t stand dead-end consumerism and the masses, lazy prejudices abound, chose to rise up, celebrate their individuality, get the attention they craved in order to validate said individuality, and sock it to life’s non-thinkers with an all new set of thought terminating clichés designed to appeal to the high-minded.  Most people are stupid, they believed. They weren’t. They resolved to enjoy the fact with a vigorous quarter hour of mutual masturbation. Don’t misunderstand me, I like being jerked off, I’m merely pointing out how these things work.

The audience that turn up to events like ACMS, a night of experimental comedy; that’s experimental for the performers, not comedy itself; are the guffaw aficionados, people for whom comedians are idols. They take it very seriously, but then getting the right set of complimentary blot-ons to your personality is a serious business. Get it wrong and your carefully cultivated sense of self starts to subside. Reality after all, is a great leveller… the bastard.

Nothing wrong with a bit of idolatry, you might think, unless you’re an Israelite, but sitting down to enjoy this mixed bag of yak yak peddlers, in a pub with the TARDIS’ doors, I wondered how these fawning hooters would react to a real world Gethin Price. Is that what they wanted? Or did they want to see their own values and attitudes reflected back to them plus jokes, and if that was the point, were we any better off?

That there is a memorial society for Alternative Comedy suggests it’s dead and I suppose that formally, as a movement, that’s true. The angry iconoclasts of the 80s became comfortable and content as we all got more prosperous and less ideological, each and every one of us bought off, and they succeeded in making mirth more middle class and self-conscious, which was the point, supplanting the one joke, culturally illiterate proles as the comedy establishment.

As the alternative became the norm, and essentially remains so, perhaps ACMS isn’t a lament for a lost movement but for an alternative of any kind; a time when comedy felt fresh, exciting, possibly even dangerous. What might this new chortle spring be an alternative to? Isn’t every comedian an alternative comedian now? My pear cider (made with 100% real pear) and I agreed it could only be television. The ultimate aim of any young buck and doe occupying these North London metrosexual-hang outs, had to be to get on it and replace the likes of Jimmy Carr an-, well, actually that’d be enough.

So what hope that the acts in Tuesday’s show might one day have their own six-part BBC series? Well, once you stripped out all the self-deprecation and material built around the erroneous idea that being consciously unfunny is the new funny, which it isn’t, then there wasn’t a great deal left.

One particularly troubling set wasn’t a set at all, rather a deconstruction of the racist and sexist jokes of another comedian, Paul Chowdhry, with faux admiration. Aside from the obvious problem, that this isn’t strictly speaking an act, there was the worry that it was all distinctly old hat. It was bad enough, you thought, that a modern comedian was still relying on unreconstructed misogyny and racism to mine laughs (had the original alternative scene been for nought?), but here was a neo-alternative act that was reliant on that crap to fill their time. It was stultifying safe, not least because she was preaching to the converted – not a single view was challenged, but also laugh free, righteous indignation the substitution for jokes and original comment.

No less than three of the performers fell back on sub-Tim Vine groaners, ironically dispatched of course, to bulk out their set. Some of these gags, “AIDS: Silly Monkey”, were undeniably funny, and if it works why worry I suppose, but I did worry, because I’m a worrier. I worried I was being conned.

I could laugh at people not being funny, tongue in cheek, all night and I’d have a great time, but wouldn’t a better experiment have been to try and make us laugh with an original routine? Deconstruction works because it fluffs the crowd and leaves them with that post-coital afterglow. ‘Look’, says Nathanial Taft, all tweeds and retro-specs, ‘I’m being unfunny on purpose; I’m that good that I’ve inverted your modest expectations, which gives the impression I’m in command of my material, and I’ve suggested that I have a sophisticated sense of humour, justifying your decision to come and see me’. Not only that, Nathanial’s audience gets to feel clever, because they can see the strings.

Stewart Lee builds his routines around this idea but he’s rather better at saying something about comedy, his audience and indeed, himself. Acts that could be described as “embittered schlub”, “eager tadpole” and “Egg from This Life”, all showed a sense of comic timing and an ability to trade on the nervous tension they’d created, but there was no content. The closing act was lazier still – a routine about not having a routine. I didn’t have a routine either, but then I hadn’t been slipped fifty quid to entertain the room.

Of what remained, there was hope for the future; no politics or social comment you understand, we’ll have to wait a couple more years before austerity and social collapse radicalises these pools of spilt ejaculate and awakens their political consciousness; the single most important factor that gave alternative comedy its edge; but genuine laughs were on hand. Sarah Bennetto managed to be both charming and available, which is always appreciated, with a routine centred on her search for an erection. Turning the audience into a giant Guess Who board was a nice idea and she was endearingly kooky. I’d date her but I don’t think she’d appreciate the medical condition, known to regular readers, that denies me the physical act of laughter.

Rachel and Luke, a couple whose talent show act centred on the former getting the latter to jump through a hoop dressed as the dog he’d killed, was inventive and better for having a backstory. Luke assuming the character of the dog and fucking an audience member’s leg was a nice touch. You don’t expect a grown man to fuck your leg. That, I suppose, is comedy.

In fact, it was double acts that made the evening. The compères, John-Luke Roberts and Thom Tuck played well off each other; nice repartee and endearingly ramshackle, while Robin and Partridge, who one imagines met at a university club for students with ornithological names and realised they’d have to be a comedy duo or a pair of wildlife TV presenters, stole the show with a polished and enjoyably madcap set that played like a demented stream of consciousness from a hive mind. Sure, they had the bad puns and consciously poor jokes but they also had energy and confidence. They made me laugh like an idiot, which is impressive given my aforementioned condition.

So that was ACMS, a comedy night that I left in a fucking hurry because I feared missing my train. I was flattered that I’d been part of a literate and cerebral audience, or something like it, that was immaculately dressed and well sourced from the city’s various art colleges and Soho based PR companies. I may even go again, up my cool load and contribute to comedy history, able to say I was there in the early days before these sprightly youths became fat on success and middle age. Yes, I’d be like one of the 17 people who attended the first Sex Pistols gig. Well, assuming the next one didn’t clash with my calligraphy and canapés Tuesday at Islington’s Art Factory.

ACMS takes place every other Tuesday: Go to http://www.redliontheatres.co.uk/alternative-comedy-memorial-society.htm for deets. Mention Is That All There Is and get £2 added to the price of your ticket.

More of this sort of thing:

• Arts Review: The Last of the Red Wine
• The Great Composer: A Tale of Two Concerts
• Cinema: A Story of Love and Hate
• Music Review: Gamoid – Tosspiece Theatre
• Ed Whitfield’s Mirthless Nights…with Frankie Boyle and friends
• Teleidiocy: A Blight on the Nation’s Viewing Habits

Dear Steven,

I’m certain that you’ll know my reputation as a party monster. Throughout London and several other provincial areas within the United Kingdom, my name has become a byword for outrage; a synonym for fun, and that reputation was built at a thousand and one wedding receptions.

Yes, that’s right Steven, I’m the same Ed Whitfield who used telekinesis to ruin the after party of Mr and Mrs Ben Steinberg; I am the man who drove a Lamborghini Jalpa into Maggie Swire’s cleavage; I’m responsible for the breakup of Tyrone and Loretta Cock, just 36 minutes after they said ‘I do’, though Tyrone later told me that he was grateful and was genuinely sorry to hear about my injuries and the year I’d spent in a home for emasculated husbands.

As I write this it’s the morning after the wedding of Neil Gaiman and Jodie Schwitzer. I’m told Jodie desperately wanted me there, though because Neil and I fell out back in May following his refusal to admit he’d penned The Doctor’s Wife, an incident that precipitated the mashing of my genitals when I wouldn’t let the matter drop, the bride to be felt it would be better if I came using the alias “Saggy Membranes’ plus one”.

She didn’t tell me this directly you understand; she couldn’t in case he learned of it, thus Saggy was forced to maintain the fiction that his girlfriend was eight months pregnant and ill, and was drafting me as an eleventh hour companion. I gave a lot of credit to Saggy for keeping up the pretence before, during and after the ceremony and yet more to Bernadette, his woman, who looked both pregnant and unwell when I arrived for my lift to the church.

As I sat in the reception hall, studying the sedimentary layer of vomit that had settled at the base of my glass of fruit punch, eyes flicking up to watch Saggy lead the floor in the dance to Superman by Black Lace, and trying to remember which bridesmaid I’d sexed behind the giant speaker 40 minutes earlier, I reflected on the season finale of Doctor Who, a title that now has more urgency than it once did, and the direction you’ve taken the series this year. My conclusions may surprise you, though if you’ve read any of the other letters I’ve sent, probably not.

Time Head

It’s been an unusual year, Steven; you’ve had the audience chasing their own shadows. It may have ended with all of our initial suspicions confirmed and few cast iron, copper bottomed surprises, but to your credit, if the destination was known, the route was far from clear, and you’ve certainly managed to take the long way round. In fact, if this were a car journey, it’s fair to say we’d have all been reported missing several months ago.

I was dreading tonight’s episode, I won’t pretend otherwise. I saw it all before me and imagined only fudge, bullshit and whimsy; I’d developed a condition you inadvertently named – Time Head, a degenerative mental disorder characterised by fear of non-linear storytelling. I wanted this episode to work so badly that my fingernails looked like splintered wood; my balls were in my stomach; I hadn’t eaten in half an hour.

In the event I should have trusted you, you did fine. My big fears didn’t come to pass. River wasn’t a version of The Doctor, you didn’t reveal his identity (yet)– in which case the series is over; you didn’t employ an ontological paradox to save his life… Well, maybe you did in the sense that it was only foreknowledge of the event that allowed him to save himself, but there was a bigger picture here and once understood, I began to remember why I’d felt so hopeful when you were appointed as head writer. The Doctor had to die, or rather his legend had to, and this was all to the good, because as you’d intimated, he was getting too big for his TARDIS and his long history, the show’s long history, was becoming an albatross around the writers’ necks. His enemies knew him too well. He in turn, knew everything. I can understand why you wanted to bury all of that.

What we learned

The Wedding of River Song wasn’t a story in its own right of course. This year you’ve eschewed those, while enforcing that constraint on your other writers, in favour of what was essentially a five-part story spread throughout the season – an old Doctor Who serial in fact. Kudos Steven, we like those, but you took an awful risk, spread betting like that. Individual episodes that dealt with “the arc” felt like idea stacks, rather than stories, because, like the proverbial River Song, we were forced to leave the chain of events for eons at a time. What sustained us in the interim felt slight by comparison – Neil’s episode notwithstanding. So how might you beat this problem next year?

Well for a start you might try changing the structure of the season. Stand-alone episodes don’t work very well in your vision of Who, so why have them? Instead, give other writers the chance to spin epic yarns and be playful. How about a season of two and three parters? Make every episode unmissable. The second thing you could do is focus on making your two or three part stories more self-contained – stories in their own right; pin your ideas to a tale that is thematically linked to but can survive independently of, the series arc.

You can link your stories – sequelise them even, as you have done this year, but don’t write episodes that are just a series of teases and character revelations, underpinned by conceptual masturbation. People remember your two parter from the 9^th Doctor era because you told a story as well as introducing characters; ditto for the Tennant library two parter, but no one is going to remember Let’s Kill Hitler’s story for example, because there wasn’t one. They’ll remember the revelations. Tell stories next year, don’t be content to join dots.

This was my fear, that The Wedding of River Song would be a join the dots episode, but somehow it felt more coherent than that; it rewarded attentive viewers who’d suffered severe Time Head in previous instalments. I thought I’d hate the idea of The Doctor getting married but somehow you made it work; it was a necessary part of The Doctor’s plan and had a function. I can live with it. Besides, we know he’s a bigamist, as he’s already married to the TARDIS anyway.

Was the tessellating man ship a cosmic cheat? In the heat of the moment I’d have said yes, akin to using the dreaded ganger solution we’ve been anticipating half the year, but again, I should have trusted you. With hindsight there was a lovely symmetry between The Doctor controlling his suit and River being controlled by hers. Yes, I liked that a lot – The Doctor being the Impossible Astronaut – a man who survives his own death by taking refuge within a protective suit. This was the episode where it became apparent that you weren’t making it up as you went along, you’d thought it through after all. I’m still not sure why the suit began to regenerate after the first hit – the illusion of regenerative energy built using excess tiles, perhaps? Still, if we understood everything you’d have to take your name off it, wouldn’t you?

Doctor Who?

So, the series is over and we haven’t just looped back to the beginning of the season but the beginning of the series. You’ve dared to ask the question, the one which was, as you say, in plain sight, such is your thirst for a series tease more intense than the last. What trumps the permanent death of The Doctor? Only his identity. It was cunning to make the solution to this mystery, the series’ one abiding conundrum, the Achilles heel of your new enemy; a revelation so dangerous, as you put it, that these self-appointed sentinels of history have to exterminate our hero to keep it on the down low. My new fear is that now the question’s the story, you’ll feel compelled to answer it.

This “terrible, dangerous secret” has to remain a secret, Steven, and not for the sake of The Silence, though I respect their beliefs, but for ours. Once answered the series is over. Did you also tell us, in this final episode, that Matt Smith’s third series as The Doctor will be his last? I know we can’t afford to be too literal in a show like this, but “the fall of the eleventh” on those fields of Trensalore (presumably where lore goes to die), sounds like the end for the Galifreyian ganglinoid.

When this sentence was uttered a voice in my head said three things; ‘Put it away, she’s looking’,‘50^th anniversary special’ and ‘regeneration’. Tempting as it may be to reveal The Doctor’s identity in the show’s 50^th year I implore you not to do it. We’d like it to run for another 50 years; the “Who” part of the title is there for a reason; full disclosure means the end of the story and the end of the series. The show is bigger than any one actor but not that secret. Sure, you can tell me, just leave the nation out of it.

That’s it from me, Steven. I’m going to take some time out now to get a life, or something like it. I look forward to the next series, of course I do. Though the end of it may finish me, I think the journey, as ever, will be a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to a set of adventures that promise to be very strange for two reasons. One, The Doctor will no longer have an intrusive legend, so will resemble his earliest incarnations and the tone of the stories may adjust to reflect this new reality but two, his past, essentially the question of who he is, will be the Cartmel-like undercurrent of the next 13 instalments. These are changes that I might have made myself were I sitting in your seat and you in mine, but full disclosure? The answer to that titular question? No, Steven. Never. Well, never say never, but perhaps only with the axe looming instead of the hiatus. Keep that in mind old fruit.

Remember, I’ll be watching.

Yours in time and cyberspace,

Ed

Series catchup:

• Dear Steven Moffat: Closing Time 
• Dear Steven Moffat: The God Complex
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Girl Who Waited
• Dear Steven Moffat: Night Terrors
• Dear Steven Moffat: Let’s Kill Hitler 
• Dear Steven Moffat: A Good Man Goes to War
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Almost People
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Rebel Flesh
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Doctor’s Wife
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Curse of the Black Spot
• Dear Steven Moffat: Day of the Moon
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Impossible Astronaut 

Dear Steven,

Our journey, much like The Doctor’s, is almost at an end, but before we slice open this series and conduct a hurried and slapdash post-mortem, missing the vital clues that might confer peace on an irritable and confused Whovian family, there’s the minor matter of Gareth Roberts’ Closing Time; penultimate jollies to calm the mind and prepare it for the membrane pounding concept pile-up, that is surely next week’s finale.

The Wedding of River Song, to which I wasn’t invited, is bound to be pregnant with pathos and melancholia and posturing and high-concept time babble, so our hope for Roberts’ Lodger sequel, was that it would be a pick me up, a breather, a banterthon, and consequently we’d all have the opportunity to enjoy a few jokes and nothing too intense before life as we know it comes to a halt, and reality is turned upside down. Well, you may congratulate Mr R, Steven; this episode wasn’t as good as The Lodger but it was a ball tickle; good clean fun.

It’s strange how Doctor Who can take something familiar and change it utterly. I’m not talking about lifts becoming teleport pads or department stores made sinister, they were already sinister, but James Corden, and the show’s knack, now shown twice over, of making him rather lovable, instead of the universal hate figure of legend.

Craig Owens is a fine character; not full time companion material, we all understand that – he’s a little too exasperated, not to mention domesticated for the life – but perfect for the occasional adventure. Roberts’ conceit, that Craig is an ordinary guy with modest aspirations, whose life is occasionally upended by the man with the 50s hair cut, is welcome, because we need not worry about the particulars. The adventure begins for us, as it does for Craig, the moment the poor sod opens his front door, and we know it’ll be over 40 minutes later. In the meantime we can sit back, minimise the porn window on our laptops and enjoy what the Celts refer to as “the craic”, though I wish they wouldn’t.

There’s a danger, naturally, that an episode built upon comic misunderstandings and japery, may becomes slight, perhaps disposable, but I think Closing Time just about dodged that bullet. Two things helped it along. One, with The Doctor’s demise imminent, there was an undercurrent of sadness to the whole thing, realised in lots of emotionally engaging snippets – The Doc reflecting on his age and past selfishness for example, a nice scene with the Timelord and Corden’s baby in which he turned the nursery into a planetarium and pondered the fact that he’d done everything he wanted with his life, while baby Alfie had it all ahead of him, etc – this was good stuff. Amy and Rory’s cameo was also a nice touch; what a relief to find that our favourite red head was fronting a perfume campaign and hadn’t slipped into a career as a lap dancer to pay off Rory’s gambling debts.

Two, the relationship between The Doctor and Craig is warm and dare I say, sweet. You can fully understand why people would mistake them for a homo-couplet; they look good together. Sure, the tone of the episode was jaunty, some would say farcical – you had to laugh as Craig wrestled with a mechanical rodent which, in true b-movie style, he seemed to be holding to his own throat, but this was the charm of the episode; it wasn’t heavy, just in turn touching and very funny, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need. If I feel half as good following next week’s finale, I’ll consider that a lucky escape.

Still, this was the pre-finale appetiser and consequently the final five minutes were reserved for the arc. Craig gave The Doctor his Stetson, he went to the TARDIS and suddenly, BANG, we were in the future and back with River and her evil sponsors. After a minor struggle she was reactivated as a weaponised curly-pow, sunk into an astronauts suit, the significance of which I’d forgotten, and left at the bottom of Lake Silencio, ready to strike.

Steven, my one hope for next week’s episode is that it holds some surprises. I say this, because the final scene of Closing Time fed my fear, a fear that’s been building throughout this season, that the simplest explanation for each mystery, seeded by you in a series of early ejaculations, is the correct one.

From the beginning of this series, River was our prime suspect for The Doctor’s assassin, not just because she’s implied her guilt for two years, but also because she gave the game away by exclaiming “No, of course not”, when she failed to kill the shooter, following the assassination. ‘Right, so that’s River then’ thought we, but nevertheless hope remained that you were cleverer than your audience and you were going to wrongfoot us – yet you didn’t. River, we thought, following a series of monster sized hints, is Amy’s daughter, but no we said, NO, that’s too bleedin’ obvious – so obvious in fact, that it turned out to be correct.

If the name of the game was to tie everything up in a coherent fashion, then you’d be winning, but surely the pleasure inherent in a non-linear plot, is that you show the effect, tease several explanations for the possible cause and then lead the audience down the garden path before revealing a fiendishly cunning alternate that undercuts our expectations? Getting to the destination by an unexpected route is half the fun but this season, thus far, you’ve signposted the path to the climax at every turn.

Now there’s only one head-fucking question left, namely how does The Doctor survive death? To be fair to you, Steven, there’s no obvious explanation for this, other than he doesn’t, so you’ll understand my disappointment if that turns out to be the case. The series, we know, will continue, as will Matt Smith, so we know that ending can’t stand, yet you burnt his corpse and told us it was a fixed point in time that couldn’t be changed. Having lead us exactly where we expect to go all year Steven, I hope you’ve got an absolutely fantastic explanation for this one – a solution that’s going to confound all your critics. It’s a big episode, we’re told, one that will set out a new vision for the series. If that vision is a couple of companions travelling through time and space with an urn, I won’t be pleased.

One last thing y’bastard; why is the astronaut impossible? The answer to that, I expect, is the crux of it. Don’t fuck it up.

Yours in time and cyberspace,

Ed

Catch up before it’s too late:

• Dear Steven Moffat: The God Complex
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Girl Who Waited
• Dear Steven Moffat: Night Terrors
• Dear Steven Moffat: Let’s Kill Hitler 
• Dear Steven Moffat: A Good Man Goes to War
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Almost People
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Rebel Flesh
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Doctor’s Wife
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Curse of the Black Spot
• Dear Steven Moffat: Day of the Moon
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Impossible Astronaut 

Dear Steven,

I suppose it’s common enough for the programme’s acolytes to see aspects of their own lives in the material; my friend Milton Schicks once told me a story about his now defunct girlfriend, who had such bouffant hair that her silhouette was almost identical to that of a classic Cyberman. Staying with her overnight, he told me, became impossible. She was shy, particularly when it came to sex, but Milton had to insist that the lights stayed on at all times. Naturally she thought he was mocking her, or eliciting some measure of sadistic glee from her discomfort and ultimately the relationship died. Milton’s luck didn’t improve. His next girlfriend looked like a Dalek with the light off, leading to serious concerns that he hadn’t asked the right questions on their first couple of dates.

Toby Whithouse’s God Complex made me think about my own experiences. I recalled my economy room at the Circus Circus, Las Vegas, and the call girl I’d invited there in the early hours of the morning. I thought about how I’d thrown green backs at her and made outrageous and degrading sexual demands, one of which ultilised the glow stick I’d acquired at the Barry Manilow gig the previous night.

I thought about my own God Complex in those uncertain hours; I’d felt so powerful, like my whole body was an erection. My thumping heartbeat drowned out her cries. The Jack Bauer role play, the Emilio Estivez marathon, puppetry of the breasts; when I look back on it now Steven, I feel ashamed. I’m not that man. Still, in a life where I’m frequently disempowered and feel a prolonged sense of listlessness and fear, this was a rare moment of being master of all dominions, a law unto myself. Candice didn’t deserve the awful things that happened to her that night, but I did take her for breakfast by way of an apology. I even settled the bill in full, meaning she only had to leave the tip.

In this episode, the titular complex turned out to be The Doctor’s; a welcome variant on the megalomaniac alien controls a group of space captives premise. Whithouse’s script was deceptively clever, thought I. There was every reason to suppose that it would be a generic tale; a hotel of room 101s with victims to match and a climax in which The Doctor, having tried a few things, would work out how to turn the tables on their captor and save the day. But Whithouse, showing the type of character-centric thinking that we like on this bastard, had a more interesting idea. The snare was fuelled not by fear, as we all supposed, but by faith, and this was a neat little device that allowed an exploration of the theme developed earlier in the series, of The Doctor’s hubris.

Amy had grown to see The Doctor as her saviour and this, we discovered, was just what the alien trap required in order to finish her off. The Timelord, realising that his arrogance was going to cost our beautiful Scottish thistle her life, was forced to admonish his companion of his shortcomings. ‘I took you with me because I was vain,’ he told her, ‘I’m not a hero.’ Well Steven, I thought that was a smashin’ little scene; a much needed corrective to The Doctor’s monolithic confidence, which occasionally robs the character of his third dimension. This showed his human side, the part we can truly believe in, because as Kirk once reminded Spock, everyone’s human, even if you’re not.

If that was a good moment then the episode’s coda was better yet. The Doctor, realising that he’d become a bit of a liability to Amy and Rory, bless ‘em, made the sudden and unexpected decision to end their travels together. He bought them off with a house and a car, explaining to a tearful Pond, that he’d rather the happy couple lived a long life of dull domesticity, than a short exciting one in which one of them ended up grieving for the other, or worse, sharing a cemetery plot. ‘He’s saving us’ Amy told Rory, as the newly liberated couple returned to their house to open an Ocado account. I felt sad, Steven, I’d grown to like this pair, even Rory, but my tears dried quickly, safe in the knowledge that they’d be back in a couple of episode’s time.

The Doctor’s concern for his companions’ safety was touching but I did wonder why he’d got through so many before deciding to take this course of action. Still, Amy and Rory were his first married pair. He’d had a greater impact on their lives than most I suppose. He’d groomed Amy as a companion from childhood, he’d given her a lunatic bent that only a guy like Rory would find endearing, he’d been instrumental in the conception of their child, creating the pre-conditions for the baby’s very unique character, and he’d even been a guest at their wedding. In other words, these two were less disposable than most; he’d let them in. Maybe that’s why this departure mattered.

I did wonder why Amy was quite so casual about the fact that her baby was still missing in the time stream but maybe she thought, ‘ah fuck it, I know she’s alright and this way I miss all the nonsense like toilet training, sleepless nights, school fees, puberty and having to explain away Rory’s porn collection.’ This, of course, was why we couldn’t get too sad; we knew this story was not yet done. For one thing Amy and Rory were present at The Doctor’s death, which although firmly in their past, would mean we’d see them again very soon. That episode, we know, features River, after all she’s in the title, so it’s fair to assume that the couple’s baby blues may also be dealt with, meaning we’ll have to travel to the couple’s present. Will you conclude the story, Steven? That’s not really your style is it? Do advance it a bit though, won’t you? We’re not watching this shit for our health.

Looking ahead to next week, and the return of Craig from The Lodger, a character I like and am happy to be used as an occasional companion, I was reminded of the missing two centuries that were discussed in The Impossible Astronaut. Now The Doctor has abandoned A and R, can we assume that this is the beginning of that lost period? It’s interesting that when the Gallifreyian ganglinoid next sees the happy couple he’ll have had several seasons’ worth of adventures. I’m glad we’ll get to see at least one of them, though I wonder if, given the non-linear nature of the series, we’ll get to see a few more in future? Why not make next season a “lost season”; delay The Doctor’s death solution by a year? That’ll piss your critics off, won’t it? In any event, it makes next week an adventure in its own right, rather than pre-climax filler and that, Steven, is a smart move.

I must go. Milton has just e-mailed me. He wants me to come down The Buckshot and Backside, and meet his new girlfriend, Veronica Greene-Deth. Apparently she’s a beauty.

Yours in time and cyberspace,

Ed

A bit of previous:

• Dear Steven Moffat: The Girl Who Waited
• Dear Steven Moffat: Night Terrors
• Dear Steven Moffat: Let’s Kill Hitler 
• Dear Steven Moffat: A Good Man Goes to War
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Almost People
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Rebel Flesh
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Doctor’s Wife
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Curse of the Black Spot
• Dear Steven Moffat: Day of the Moon
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Impossible Astronaut