Don't read this. It's mainly boasting.

Afternoon all. The sun's shining and I've had an unusually wonderful few days, so I thought I'd indulge in a little light gloating.

It all started on Thursday. My colleague and I headed off to London (eventually) to present a paper at the Politics of Doctor Who conference organised by the indefatigable Prof Danny Nicol at the University of Westminster. Our hotel was in Walthamstow, East 17, which reminded me of my younger sisters' taste in 90s music. After that, a night drinking fine Samuel Smith ales on Shaftesbury Avenue, then off to the conference in the morning. I was stunned by the international nature of the event - lots of speakers from US, Australia and Germany – and by their eminence: lawyers and others with strings of books to their names and all cheerfully proud of our Who knowledge. It was really multi-disciplinary too. The Germans from Chemnitz Technical University drew parallels between Who stories and the NSA, social scientists did content analysis work (months of painstaking event logging), lawyers examined questions such as whether the Doctor is a war criminal and whether the assistants can sue him for distress and injury (yes he is and yes they can, but he can also sue the TARDIS for negligently taking them to dangerous places, as it's sentient). One paper looked at parallels between Doctor Who and HG Wells, while others examined the fluid gender politics of the various series. My paper used Foucault's theories of power relations to examine the dystopian mirror universes of Doctor Who 'Inferno' and Star Trek 'Mirror, mirror' (ensuring that I beat the other nerds hands down) to suggest that the idealised prime universes (near-future Britain and the Federation) might actually be more subtly oppressive than the abjected evil mirror universes, and that the British and American shows have a rather different politics. Who is pragmatic, flexible and believes in muddling through, while Trek deals in moral absolutes even if it means avoiding resolution in the end. It was enormous fun, and I think people liked what we said, especially when we introduced them to the Beard of Evil. I blogged a summary a few days ago.

I guess what held us together was the shared understanding that popular culture is important from a supply and a demand perspective. Popular drama matters because they're platforms for the expression of aesthetic, ideological and cultural perspectives and reach people in ways that formal non-fictional genres don't. From the reception side, I think that anything millions of people consume – and the very complex and multiple ways in which they consume them and incorporate them into their lives – is by definition important. That's why I happily promote media studies in the teeth of snobbish opposition. If you want to know what the majority of a society cares about, you don't examine the avant-garde: you examine the soap operas, news broadcasts and prime-time TV shows.

So that was massively enjoyable and interesting. How could we top that? Well, by going to Hammersmith's gorgeous deco Apollo to see Kate Bush perform, her first live shows since 1979 when I was four (and hadn't heard of her). I've only known her music very well for a few years, but couldn't miss these shows. In our lifetimes, I guess they're the equivalent of Elvis's Vegas years, except that Bush isn't washed-up creatively and physically. I wasn't disappointed. Her voice is strong, dark and rich. The high notes are still there, but they've lost the piercing quality that may have put off people in songs like 'Wuthering Heights' all those years ago. The show is split into two - The Ninth Wave which is the second side (that dates me) of Hounds of Love, and 'And Endless Sky of Honey' from Aerial, a much later album. I love both LPs very much, but preferred the staging of 'The Ninth Wave' - slightly less sentimentality about her son, and a darker tone (and no puppets). Whatever the differences, this was more than a gig, more than a list of songs: it was art. The staging was inventive and mesmerising, always daring if not always successful.

The crowd I could have done without. A standing ovation every time they recognised a song starting, and obsessive cheering and applauding Bush's son came close to sycophancy. As her chat between songs was completely drowned out every time, I wondered if everyone was too fixated on being part of the event that they'd forgotten who was actually the creative one. Credit to everyone for accepting Bush's request not to film or photograph the show though: I didn't see a single glowing screen.

Though I had a few reservations about individual artistic decisions, the event was important because it so confidently raised the artistic bar. Bush takes risks because she believes her music, acting and dance form a coherent mode of expression which deserves respect, and she's right. It'll be hard to go back to see bands which just run through a set-list and hope they land a lucrative advert. The tickets were hugely expensive, but you could see that every penny had gone into planning, designing, building, rehearsing, lighting, choreography and thinking. Other bands have staged spectacular events – such as U2's supposedly subversive Zoo TV and Popmart tours, which simply demonstrated that they'd grown too big for their tax-avoiding globe-trotting boots, and that their grasp of irony was superficial at best. Bush's worked because she's more intelligent and more sophisticated than anyone else in her field.

How to top presenting on Doctor Who and seeing Kate Bush on the same day? Spending the rest of the weekend in good company. A trip to Tate Modern, an afternoon catching up with more distant friends, one of the best meals of my life in a dilapidated, deserted Indian social club, and finally a trip to the William Morris Museum in Walthamstow. After that, it was back to work, where the first job was to give the encomium at a graduation ceremony to Olympic athlete Denise Lewis, to whom we awarded an honorary doctorate. I'd seen her in action before at the UK School Games: she's down-to-earth, funny and kind, as well as inspirational to our students. She even laughed at my reference to her second place in Strictly Come Dancing, which was generous of her.

Today I've been meeting the new Graduate Teaching Assistants, a new training post for the next generation of academics: I'll be mentoring them. I'm slightly scared: they're all very very clever and much more advanced than I was at their age. I shall have to crush their optimism and energy before they turn their powers against me. Otherwise, I have visions of Logan's Run, and I don't mean the naked Jenny Agutter scene.

Tomorrow it's back to more graduation ceremonies, back in the gown and hat. This time it's for my own students, so I'll be applauding (mostly fondly) as some familiar and some inexplicably unfamiliar) faces appear on stage. If I'm feeling really satirical I'll bring along all the uncollected essays from their years here. I've done it before…

Phasers on Stunned

I appear to have broken one of my friends, a colleague and a co-writer!

I've been pretty quiet this week because I've been working really hard on a conference paper (and hopefully journal article). The conference is on The Politics and Law of Doctor Who: its energetic progenitor Danny Nicol has even set up a blog well in advance to kick ideas around outside the closed circle of academia, which is the kind of thing that makes me happy.

I've been thinking for ages that I should put my interest in popular culture and science fiction to good (academic) use rather than treating it as a private pleasure. The geeks have seemingly inherited the earth, looking through cinema and TV listings, so it's not as if SF is a guilty pleasure any more (the extended version of this rant is very similar to the defence of Media and Cultural Studies I will deliver at the drop of a hat).

So anyway, this conference seemed like an ideal opportunity. I toddled off to my esteemed colleague who works extensively in pop culture (particularly serial killers, pornography, 'underground' fiction, comics and so on) because I knew he'd love to have a go at this. Cue months of wading through the oceans of material he found: production notes, spin-off novels and comics, scripts, the lot. Eventually, we picked one Who seven-part adventure ('Inferno')* and a single Trek episode, 'Mirror, Mirror'.** They're both about dangerous searches for energy sources, both feature mirror universes and both appeared on TV in Britain at exactly the same time: 'Mirror, Mirror' aired in the same week as the last episode of 'Inferno'. Who could resist?





'Mirror, Mirror' is famous as the origin of the science fiction trope Beard of Evil, because Spock in the Evil universe has a goatee so you can tell them apart:

In actual fact, Beardy Spock isn't evil, he just behaves cruelly because that's the logical thing to do in a cruel universe. It does mean that Evil Kirk gets to utter the immortal line 'Has the Galaxy gone crazy? Where's your beard?'.

By an amazing coincidence, 'Inferno' also uses facial hair and features to differentiate mirrored characters. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (uptight but decent old stick) has a military moustache. His evil counterpart Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart has no moustache but does have a scar and an eyepatch.

Nasty

Nice

So that's the aesthetics sorted out. What we're interested in is how these popular SF TV shows constructed their 'ideal' politics by representing an 'evil' mirror.*** Bearing in mind that they were made in the late 60s and early 70s, it's interesting that they don't choose Communism. Instead, 'Mirror, Mirror' depicts a piratical world of violent oppression by an Empire, while 'Inferno' chooses a fascist regime, albeit one with Orwellian Stalinist overtones mixed in with a general Nazi atmosphere. So what we think is that both shows avoid criticism of the political cultures which generated them by presenting horrific regimes which some viewers may find resemble states against which they actually fought. 

All seems quite simple. And then I decided that Foucault would be useful here, and I went back to Discipline and Punish, adding 'Technologies of the Self' to the mix. That led me to Kant and the Federation's slightly confused invocation of the categorical imperative, and before long I'd generated 100 pages of notes which seemed to suggest that the Empire (which applies an Agoniser to incompetent crew members) and the Republic (which practises summary execution) are far less oppressive than Who's normal Britain and the Federation, because the Empire doesn't give a damn what you think as long as you do what you're told (and makes you carry around an Agoniser that superior officers use on you when you're not performing up to scratch), whereas the Federation has ways (philosophical 'technologies') to make you love it. It doesn't need to torture you because you've internalised its values and spend your time worrying about whether you've lived up to them in your daily life (hence the importance of the Captain's Log): you govern yourself and become a subject by examining yourself for signs of deviation. The conclusion is that the Doctor's preferred England deserves to survive because it has room for sexiness and intellectual flexibility, whereas the fascist Republic gets blown up because the mad scientist and his party friends are too rigid to admit they need help (and sex). Star Trek's Empire will probably fall or be reformed for the same reasons, with a little help from Not Actually Evil Spock once the 'good' Kirk points out the logic of not committing genocide while giving him a device allowing him to murder his way to the top of the Empire. The Federation, I feel, is a little smug in the way that hegemonic American culture tends to be: I like Doctor Who's rather English assumption that bumbling along without having to be absolutely right all the time is probably the best way to go. Foucault disagrees: he thinks that 'tolerant liberal' states are just subtler at turning individuals into tools of state continuation. 

My colleague thinks this is a slightly fascistic argument, but I'm sticking to the line that it's radically poststructuralist. I've just sent him a largely incoherent and obsessive cowpat of this argument and he's got to a) hack a 20 minute presentation out of it and b) cross out all the bits he thinks are bollocks. The good outcome of all this is that he can't do it tomorrow so I have a day off. The down side is that I've just remembered that rather than go for a long bike ride, I'm going to a funeral instead. 

But when anyone asks me what I do, I can quite truthfully say that students' massive debts pay me to work out what French poststructuralist philosophy has to say about 1970s Saturday evening TV. It's a hard job, but someone's got to do it. 

* That's a link to the Tardis Data Core because I love the fact that there's a whole Wikipedia just for Doctor Who. No lives have been wasted doing that at all.  

** And that's a link to the Star Trek equivalent of Wikipedia, Memory Alpha. It's a hell of a lot bigger than the Data Core too (and one day will outstrip Wikipedia because frankly a lot of knowledgeable men care a lot more about SF shows than they do about the rest of our achievements as a species. 

***'Inferno' also has some rubbish monsters called Primords but they make absolutely no narrative sense at all, so we've decided to ignore them. 

All hail Steven Moffat

He wrote the best Doctor Who episode ever (and Press Gang and Coupling), and has this to say:

"I hope the Tories don't win. Let's not beat around the bush," he says. "[But] I'd hope that anyone who becomes prime minister would look at the organisation and ask themselves if the world would really be better off without it." Moffat is not blind to the corporation's faults, but sees it as "an incredibly responsible and brilliant organisation" that is "never given credit for trying to hold itself to a higher standard, one that no newspaper or other broadcaster is".

"Are we really going to put James Murdoch in place of [the BBC]? Can you imagine how shit everything would be? Never mind the fine and glorious things that the BBC does, imagine how shit everything would be! Stuff would be shit! Let's not have really good restaurants, let's have Kentucky Fried Chicken!"

 "all we writers really want to do is write a script, toss it over a wall and go out with strippers"

The doctor's next mission: save the BBC (from the Torymen)

I said that Doctor Who justifies the licence fee (if you're not from the UK: the licence fee costs £142 and covers all BBC TV and radio (ad-free) and pays for the transmission network for all TV and radio, whatever network - bargain).

It's great. Unfortunately, the Conservative party utterly hate the BBC and public service broadcasting, and have done a deal with Rupert Murdoch's publishing and broadcasting empire: support the Tories in the upcoming election and we'll reduce the BBC to a pathetic shadow of its former self.

Russell T Davies (of Who mastery) defends the BBC passionately, here.

"To them it's a tax and they want to get rid of it."

"They'll freeze the licence fee and persuade Daily Mail readers it's the right thing to do by saying they're getting rid of all those digital channels they don't watch, that's the language they'll use."

"I think politicians only experience broadcasting through their own prism, through the Today programme and through the interviews they do. They don't sit down and watch Coronation Street or EastEnders."

"I'll come back and fight them at the barricades. I feel a bit like Alan Bennett, who said his favourite things about Britain were the BBC and the NHS."

If you vote Tory: no more Doctor Who (or semi-objective news, current affairs, documentaries, non-toy advertising children's television etc. etc. etc.). Just Fox, stamping on your face for ever.

Enter the nerdzone

Cynical Ben didn't like the first episode of the two-part finale to David Tennant's tenancy of Doctor Who, objecting to the two-part set-up, amongst other things I can't be bothered to go and check.

I do like the scope achieved by taking the time and (relative dimensions in) space to explore the nuances. Ben's a short story fan though, so I understand his point. However, I did enjoy these episodes. Yes, the first one was preparatory, but they both worked. I agree with Ben that Russell T. Davies has probably run out of steam, but he, and Tennant, deserved their indulgent, emotion-wringing farewell.

The last episode was backed with nods to the canon, flashbacks to previous episodes, and constant references to Hamlet, a play which has exerted considerable influence on this incarnation of the Doctor, faced as he has so often been by difficult choices - and in which Tennant has been performing to great acclaim recently.

I've enjoyed Davies's nerdy but passionate take on Who - but Stephen Moffat's got the dramatic skills needed to keep each episode gripping: he wrote my favourite one of all, Blink. The future's bright. Though so is the past, given that a time machine is involved.

Licence fee: vindicated.

Torchwould or Torchwouldn't?

This probably won't mean much to you if you're outside the UK or not a nerd, but did any of you follow the special Torchwood shows last week? Apart from the actual content, I loved the media blitz of having them on every night for a whole week, as well as the rather good special episodes on Radio 4.

I confess to hating the previous series' of Torchwood - badly acted, poorly scripted, designed to shock what few remaining old gits are out there. Most viewers are no doubt fine with Welsh people, gay people and gay Welsh people and the actual plots came a distinct second best. It all felt very insubstantial.

None of this was the case with these specials. Though at times it felt like a Doctor Who series without the Doctor (it's a spin-off from that show), and the themes of homosexuality and family were central to the plot, what we got was an unsettling, highly-politicised drama (one government minister proposes sourcing the children demanded from aliens from poor schools: 'what are the league tables for?' - unsettlingly, she ends up in charge at the end, and not all the endings are happy or neat). I know that 'governing classes divorced from normal life' isn't exactly news, but it was done very well. Peter Capaldi ran the gamut from evil (to everybody else) to victim (of the PM) very convincingly, and it was an especial pleasure to see him play a civil servant different to his previous version, the foul-mouthed Malcolm in The Thick of It and In The Loop. He certainly blew whoever plays Captain Jack off the screen by not devoting every facial muscle to whatever emotion was required at any particular moment.

Apart from the plots, which did have the occasional hole, the whole thing was a model of the kind of event TV which still has the power to hook us (I'm also staying up four nights a week to watch The Wire on BBC2). This is, of course, partly the product of constant cross-media promotion and the freedom the BBC has. ITV's advertisers wouldn't have been happy with a lot of the content, and that channel's revenues wouldn't stretch to the expense anyway.

Finally, it's always good to see that the BBC isn't completely metropolitan. It is trying to move departments to Manchester, though this is more for public consumption than creativity: lots of presenters will no doubt be commuting from London. Meanwhile, BBC Wales/Cymru saved Doctor Who in spectacular fashion despite the lack of an obvious Welsh link. Unless 'Doctor Who?' was the standard response to his original name. 'Hi. I'm Dr. Meredydd ap Gwalchgwyn and I'll get rid of those Daleks for you'. And let's not forget the other, rather brilliant, Who spinoff, The Sarah Jane Mysteries.

The licence fee is £142.50, covering all BBC TV, radio and internet, plus the broadcasting network. Even if you hate half the output, that's astonishingly good value - and no advertising. By comparison, I spend a lot more than that on my mobile phone contract.