Sometimes, you have to get angry in order to work out why you get angry.

I’d been telling myself that I wasn’t going to get worked up about the new series of Doctor Who. After all, having lived through the worst of last season, they’d have to be going some to get that bad. And any time I want to watch the old show, it’s there. It’s something I grew up with, something which, for better or worse, was a part of my life from as early as I can remember, right through to 1989 when the last episode of “Old Who” aired. And, after having made my wife’s life hell for 13 weeks last year, I really didn’t want to do it again. I thought I was primed. I thought I was prepared. I thought wrong…

I’ve started falling back into the old patterns. I even wrote a lengthy e-mail to my reviews editor at SFX, because he’d written a review on the website of last Saturday’s episode where I couldn’t actually believe he was talking about the same piece of television. I was agog, and it resulted in a lengthy (hopefully slightly entertaining) e-mail, and yet what does it matter? Why does this affect me so?

It’s not the fact that a certain proportion of New Who is, to be honest, not that good. Doctor Who being a quality rollercoaster is something that I’m used to- there have been brief periods in the show’s history when it’s delivered a series of classics in a row, but, for the most part, it’s a process of taking the rough with the smooth. It’s enjoying the bits that work, and wincing at or attempting to ignore the bits that don’t. All this should have been training for the new series- and yet, it wasn’t. And I think, underneath all the ups, the downs, the whys and the wherefores, I actually understand the reason now.

It’s not because it’s not very good. It’s because it’s not very good- and successful.

It’s because they have, for the most part, thrown out the intensive, off-beat, conceptual storytelling of Old Who, replacing it with louder, flashier stuff that makes some exciting noises, but falls apart if you look at it too closely. Stuff that makes emotional sense, but doesn’t really make actual, honest, common or garden sense. They’ve coated it with CGI gloss, thrown in lots of gags to make sure that it’s a ‘romp’ and nobody takes it too seriously. And people have bought it.

I could cope with Who being bad when nobody was watching. Hell, I was still a fan during the Sylvester McCoy era, and I could cope with it. Because of the stories. Because of the worlds that the show was still attempting to build (The last, real, genuine ‘Old Who’ story, for me, was the McCoy era adventure The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. And yes, there are bits in it that don’t make sense, but everything around it is so well put together, atmospheric and strange that it doesn’t make a difference).

But the way New Who is made now… and the way it’s being embraced as a daring revamp of a creaky old bit of shaky-set nonsense… it makes it feel like none of that ever mattered. Like the stories and worldbuilding and limitless scope of the original show didn’t matter. Like all they really needed was a decent SFX budget, a bit more characterisation, and lots of sexual Doctor-Companion tension, and nobody would have needed to worry about anything as dreary and uninteresting as the story.

The only way that I’d be made really happy by New Who, to be brutally honest, is if it fell flat on its face. I know it won’t, and that it’ll be around for a little while, at least. But, I’d honestly rather be watching something where there’s genuine imagination at work, even if it’s creaky, unconvincing, and decades old. I sometimes feel terribly out of step with the world, like I seriously don’t belong. The world of Doctor Who was a place where I felt like I belonged- a world of magic, and terror, and strange creatures, and a bloke in a Police Box who was strange, difficult, unpredictable, and yet would also turn out to be the best friend you could possibly have.

And the world of New Who… it’s not somewhere I feel like I want to visit that much. I’ll keep on looking from time to time. But I still miss the other world. And I wish that it didn’t feel like the more succesful New Who gets, the more of that old world gets knocked down.

There’s still room for magic in the world. You’ve just got to look a little harder for it now.

(Hope some of this makes sense…)

Okay- it’s Who, week deux, and I’m going to try not to go on for too long about this week’s episode of Who, mainly because of the fact that it actually left me kind of uninterested. There really wasn’t that much to it, except “Oh, we’re in Scotland!” “Look, Queen Victoria!” “HOLY SHIT! A WEREWOLF!!” and then lots and lots of running around. Again, we had a climax that really made very little sense whatsoever (from a writer who should drop the “T” and have Deus Ex Machina as his middle name), and a final scene that leapt from a bizarrely sombre moment where Queen Victoria banishes the Doctor and Rose for taking their dangerous lives far too frivolously, to a lengthy camp gag about “Ha, ha, the Royal family are Werewolves!” Russell T. Davies seems to veer from loving the horror side of Who to derailing entire episodes with camp in-jokes, and never finds a balance. And the whole, myth-making Torchwood running plotline is getting kind of tiresome. If they’ve got time to basically trail an upcoming spin-off, they’ve got time to think up an ending that actually makes sense. It’s all shiny, CGI surface- take it away, and there’s very little there. Suddenly, last week actually seems slightly better….

Elsewhere, life has been very little other than writing the book, which is going gradually but well. I’m coming to terms with the fact that, at the current going rate, it might end up quite long (I’m up to 50,000 words of the current draft, and I’ve only got a quarter of the way through the story). The fact that I keep finding ways of making the plot even more complicated has absolutely nothing to do with it… but I’m having fun, and will hopefully be able to start showing bits of it to people soon.

Lots to do. Not enough time to do it…

The plan for the evening was to go to the screening of SILENT HILL- but instead, Pathe decided to cancel it (only three days before the film is due to be released!). Print problems was their excuse. I ended up scurrying around the West End, and finally working my way into a screening of TELL ME WHO YOU ARE, a rather odd documentary about a famed cinematographer and his relationship with his son, which was halfway between illuminating and being a jumbled rummage through other people’s home movies.

There’s a few new pieces up at my fiction blog Division X– it’s all strange, weird, subconscious stuff. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

My blogging levels will be low for a while, as I’m currently entering an intensive time where I’ll be writing solidly for the next four weeks, in an attempt to get the novel into serious shape. As a result, sitting in front of this screen typing is the last place I want to be, but I will try and keep things under control and keep up to date. At the least, it’ll be a good way of working out my Who-related frustrations…

George had the venerable nessreader and lovely lovely Jenny from work (well, Jenny’s ex-Waterstones, technically…) over last night for dinner, and it was great fun- although nessreader, in her usual way, managed to write it up much better than I ever could. And she says she’s not a good writer. Phah…

Read on, Macduff…

Okay- so low expectations was the way to go…

It wasn’t the soul-destroying semi-embarrasment that the first episode of the last season was. It did have a selection of enjoyable moments. And, when he isn’t making speeches or going that little bit too OTT, David Tennant was very good and a hell of a lot more “Doctor”y than Christopher Eccleston ever was.
However, the first episode of the second season of Doctor Who was still a bit of a bloody mess, and continues Russell T. Davies’ grab-bag method of throwing as much money at the screen in the desperate hope that nobody notices how shonky the story is. (There’s a climax, involving plague carriers being cured- and then infecting other plague carries with a cure- that seemed to make no sense whatsoever.) Just have lots of people running around, lots of CGI (not all of it very convincing), and everyone will be happy. It’s official- I’m not convinced! (And it’s bizarre- George’s opinion was very close. She’s always very vexxed at the fact that she now can’t enjoy something without analysing and criticising it, and every time this happens she glares at me and says “Look what you’ve done to me!!!”)

It’ll be interesting to see how the season progresses- but I’ve yet to be convinced…

Less than three hours to go before the new series of Doctor Who starts, and it’s an odd time. This used to be a major, world-defining thing for me– and now, I have to admit that I don’t know how much I care. It’s just one of those things, when a show is around for long enough for you to actually grow out of it, that you have to get used to- at least, if you’re as generally obsessed with stories as I am. There’s a couple of things I’m looking forward to- mainly the episode where classic companion Sarah Jane Smith comes back, and I’m interested to see how they handle updating the Cybermen (despite the fact that the new Cybermen look overdesigned, clunky, and lack the strangely elegant menace that the best versions had), but there’s not that much that’s got me going “Wow! I hope that’s good!” On the flipside of this, low expectations (especially based on some of the truly crappy episodes from last year, some of which I haven’t even been able to watch again- and I can usually handle anything Who can throw at me) might be the key to enjoying this. I just can’t help feeling that the whole Russell T. Davies worldview (complete with “moral crusader” speeches that always get my goat up) is, at heart, completely opposite to the way Doctor Who always was for me.

At 7.15, we shall see. I’ll try and post later to either vent or say “gosh, it wasn’t too bad”. Only time will tell.

That’s what my life largely consisted of today. I sat down, and tried to get the plot of the novel down (or at least what’s there so far) onto cards, so that I’d be able to get an idea of how it’s working, how everything fits together, and where the horrendous gaps are. I’ve got some decent ideas- not sure exactly how I’m going to proceed at the moment, but it’s possible that if I spend the next month solid doing very little other than writing, I may actually get somewhere.

Or possibly not…

I’m coming to the end of another burst of subbing at IPC. Sometimes, it’s rather guiltily like being paid to twiddle your thumbs for most of the day, but this time things have been relatively intense. It’s lots of very detailed, very precise work that does get extremely wearing after a while. It’s well-paid, though, and generally making sure that I’ll be able to stick to my plan of shutting down on Thursday and concentrating on very little other than the novel. It also gets me out of the house, and gives a bit of shape to the week, which is sometimes a very welcome occurrence. It’s just a little frustrating working on listings pages- mainly because all it takes is a few schedule changes and suddenly everything you’ve done for the past hour is completely irrelevant. I get on well with everybody here, though, and I’d far prefer doing this on the basis of when I need to, rather than subbing all the time, getting lots of money, and very probably losing the will to live in the bargain (which, according to Revenge of the Sith, is all you need to do in order to actually drop dead…)

Saw ASK THE DUST last night- a literary adaptation that seemed to be the typical thirties-set “blinkered writer sets out to learn about life, but gets MORE THAN HE BARGAINED FOR!!!”, with lots of metaphorical gubbins about the relationship between America and Mexico, the idea of the Melting Pot, and Los Angeles itself. It’s one of those romances that are beautifully written, very well acted and yet without the spark that makes you care about what happens to these people. Despite the best efforts of Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, the mixture of aggression, passion and compulsion in the central relationship never actually works- it always feels very arch, very structured, and very metaphorical without ever feeling real. Bizarrely, the stuff around the relationship is far more interesting- Donald Sutherland proves exactly how good he can be in a small role as a sozzled denizen of the hotel where Farrel is staying, and there’s a short relationship between Farrell and a sad-eyed, strangely crazed and ultimately tragic woman called Vera (played by an actress called Idina Menzel) that actually has more subtlety, spark and genuine interest than anything that happens between Farrell and Hayek. It’s rather a disappointment when she gets killed in an Earthquake… On top of this, there’s the classic melodramatic touch of having your lovers reach a place of peace and bliss away from the world where everything seems perfect… and suddenly, the girl starts coughing every so often. Yes, it’s the classic “Moulin Rouge” effect (Farrell is even a writer, just to make it even better), and soon Hayek is dying of TB in as photogenic a manner as possible. There’s beautiful photography from Caleb Deschanel and it’s all gorgeously made, but despite some fantastic dialogue, I really couldn’t wait for it to end. (How very cynical and unromantic of me…)

Being ridiculously short of money (and habitually steering clear of buying comics in favour of graphic novel collections, anyway) I was leafing through the latest issue of INFINITE CRISIS in a comicshop just to find out what ridiculous things are happening in the current cataclysmic hysterically overcomplicated DC Universe crossover series, and there was one moment that really made me stop and think “Whaaaat?” Basically, it’s a sequence where a supervillain called the Psycho Pirate (Hmmm…) is killed rather brutally by another character called Black Adam (and they wonder why superhero comics have a bad reputation?). It should also be pointed out that the Psycho Pirate wears a funky golden mask that enables him to alter people’s emotions. What happens in the scene is pretty gross- Black Adam rams two fingers into the Psycho Pirate’s eyes (with corresponding splats of blood)- and in the next frame, he’s pushed the mask all the way through the Psycho Pirate’s head with the result that, quite naturally, the Psycho Pirate’s head explodes in a gigantic splatter of blood and brains. Just to make this absolutely clear- this isn’t played subtly, done in silhouette or anything to tone it down whatsoever. It’s blunt, nasty, and full frontal, and done simply to shock, which I found a bit sad. Having grown up with 2000AD, I’ve seen plenty of hilariously excessive violence- and yet it always works best when there’s a certain point, or when it’s handled a certain way. When it’s just being thrown into what is essentially a big, silly spandex and superpowers saga in order to make it seem “grittier” and “more real”, it’s exactly the kind of post-Dark Knight and post-Watchmen bollocks that has made certain comics very difficult to read. It’s aiming everything at gore-hungry fanboys who didn’t think The Authority was hardcore enough, rather than remembering that we need different styles and things aimed at different ages. It’s like the daft, silly teen mermaid movie AQUAMARINE that I saw last week- which was actually a lot more fun than I expected. It’s not particularly amazing, it’s predictable and there’s a whole load of awful sea-related puns- and yet, it does the job that it sets out to do, which is to tell an appealing story for 11-14 year old girls. Saying that all entertainment should be ‘sophisticated’ and ‘multi-layered’, appealing to every audience, forgets that there’s actually something to be said about stuff that’s aimed purely at kids. And, I guess, that’s what annoyed me about INFINITE CRISIS- that it should be something that kids can enjoy without indulging in utterly gratuitous gore, instead of something that’s only going to appeal to people with a PHD in DC Universe continuity.

Another reason why I didn’t like that was simply because the Psycho Pirate turns up in a wonderful Grant Morrison comic called Animal Man, is used really well and imaginatively (he’s the only character who remembers the continuity-shifting events of Infinite Crisis’ predecessor, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and as a result tries to bring back all the alternate Earths wiped out in the Crisis and lead the characters on a rebellion off the comic page into our reality- trippy, trippy stuff…) and written out well. And suddenly, he’s back for no apparent reason, and being used in an obscure piece of retro continuity and meeting a gory, pointless death. It’s like with the Doom Patrol- which, under Grant Morrison’s stewardship, was a beautifully strange Dadaist riot of a comic, and yet the characters then were shifted around, ignored, and finally rebooted in a totally different version. I hate it when they do that, because the loose, strange continuity of the DC Universe was one of its finest traits- the fact that in the same universe as Batman and Superman, we had weird stuff like Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer, Animal Man- hell, even The Sandman actually takes place in the DC Universe (hence appearences from Mr Miracle, The Martian Manhunter, and even Superman and Batman in “The Wake”). It was a great way of leaping from one world to another, with all these wonderful interconnections- and yet now, with Vertigo, and all the other transformations, it feels terribly homogeonised, smaller, and far less interesting. This is probably the main reason I don’t buy comics anymore- because there’s nothing that’s really seduced me into spending my money.

Of course, the third volume of Leage of Extraordinary Gentlemen is coming out soon, but that’s a different story…

Last night, I had the extreme misfortune of sitting through SCARY MOVIE 4, and spent most of the film trying to restrain myself from decapitating the two girls next to me who were braying with laughter for the whole goddammed experience. I, on the other hand, wore the same kind of expression that I usually reserve for being shown autopsy footage or old editions of the Benny Hill show– at the least, I’ve just found out that SFX want me to review it for them, so at least I didn’t have to go through it for nothing.

The novel is actually going well- I ground to a halt over the weekend, as I expected I would, and getting severely drunk with the aid of a bottle of rum on Monday didn’t help, but it’s vaguely beginning to take shape. Once I get the next bit of subbing out of the way, I can really start hammering away at it. The first two chapters are in even better shape, and I’m gradually getting an idea of how the stuff that fits around what I’ve already written is actually going to function. It’s terrifyingly complicated though- and there are moments when my brain doesn’t feel remotely up to the task. It shall be done…

Have you ever had the feeling that there’s something wrong with you? You probably have- and it’s one of those inward-looking, slightly overblown questions that you end up pondering when you haven’t got anything better to do. It has, however, been an odd, strange, and slightly unsettling week, mainly because I’m being forced to deal with the fact that there are certain elements in life that I have major, major problems dealing with. It’s strange when you suddenly realise that the way you’re behaving isn’t necessarily the best way of handling things- that maybe there’s a different reason for you getting randomly, incoherently angry than what you’re getting angry at. I’ve always experienced life at a different volume to everybody else- and sometimes, this has the added effect of transforming me into a gibbering, emotional wreck.

And it’s at moments like this that I’m amazingly thankful for George, and the fact that she actually puts up with me when I’m like that. I’m trying, and doing my best, and I’m going to get through this- I think it’s just that the last three months have been a lot tougher than I thought, and I think there’s a part of my brain that’s panicking majorly over the “sod everything, let’s write the novel!” plan. Not that I’m going to let that stop me. I’d rather get to the end of the year, be a total financial mess, and have written the novel that I wanted to write, than just give up now and attempt to return to what some foolish, unwise and badly informed folks refer to as a “normal life”.

Cynicism abounds. I’ll try and keep it under control.

I’m at work at the moment, once again subbing in an office with air conditioning that makes everything feel like being wrapped in heated cotton wool. Thought is difficult. Hopefully there will be more updates later. Stay tuned…

OKay- just woken up. The world is feeling distinctly bleary. Everybody had a great time (most of them left at about 3.30am-ish, and now Anna, George and I are sitting around looking slightly dazed, getting used to the brightness of the world.

A good evening, methinks…