I kind of wish I'd written that.

It is nice that my friendslist contains at least one response to Mad Larry that isn't too wearied by Endless Fandom Wank to find him funny.

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He's clearly very bright and capable of making connections between seemingly unconnectable ideas at a rapid rate (a sort of fandom Rattigan?). As I say, I understand very well the compulsion towards being controversial and iconoclastic on the internet, and I just thank my lucky stars that I never did anything analogous to writing a few well-regarded Doctor Who spinoff novels, such that I might feel compelled to continue acting as a spokesperson for/against my demographic. I mean, only look at LJ "celebrities" like theferrett and so on. 2000 people you don't know from Adam might check in to read your stuff every week, but if you're not getting paid for it wouldn't it start to seem a bit too much like hard work?

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I remember rather liking the books of his I did read, as these things go. He was crazy mental back then too, but it was a bit less excruciating when it didn't look a lot as though it was all he ever did. I did suspect DW fandom of having some form of madness within it that goes beyond the realms of the canny, but then I saw Harry Potter fans and realised that if they'd been around for forty overcomplicated years they'd be at least this mad. Which was oddly disappointing.

I only encountered theferrett quite recently when he decided to open-source women's breasts or whatever half-baked drivel it was. I was slightly alarmed to discover that he was Eljay-famous mainly because I still can't see why. At least Mad Larry's fun, albeit often in a fairly trainwreck way.

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(a sort of fandom Rattigan?)

More like a sort of random Fattigan.

(I'm not sure what that means, I just wanted to say it.)

thank my lucky stars

That's certainly one way to avoid that potentially painful tension between satisfying one's artistic drive and satisfying one's audience: not having an audience. If future generations discover one's work and marvel at it, good for them.

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He's a very good writer, isn't he? I don't even watch Dr. Who and he got me to read the whole thing.

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He is a great writer. I find it baffling though that smart people can spend this much time and effort (and quite a few do) complaining that Doctor Who isn't quite as literarily perfect as Ulysses or The Waste Land, when fundamentally they're all into it because they enjoyed watching Tom Baker running up and down tinfoil corridors being silly when they were kids.

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Dr Who isn't as good as it used to be. Nothing ever will be, because we aren't the persons we used to be. When I was small, I'd never seen anything like Dr Who or Star Wars in my life, and so the impression they made was huge. Now, I've seen a lot of what that genre has to offer so I'm less easily impressed.
The 'not as good as it was' school of fandon of any genre is based upon the lack of realisation that it isn't as good as it was for them; to a new generation it's as defining as what we had.
To find things that can be as good now for us, we must look further afield, in new places, ideas and things. Obsessing over the things that were good to us once will never truly satisfy as they can never be those things again.

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I'd agree with you if Doctor Who wasn't to all intents and purposes a completely different show every 3-5 years. Currently, I believe it's as good as it used to be. What isn't as good as it used to be is the show it used to be, but never mind, that did its job and then some, way back when.

I do pity the people who are fixated on one or other instantiation of the way things used to be, and want to go back to that (inside or out of Doctor Who fandom). Only ever forward!

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There's a certain error. Doctor Who now works because it's populist, rather than being dragged down by the irresistible black whole of its own cold, dead, fan-dominated backhistory. The whole reimagined version gets 8 million viewers and a healthy chunk of the licence fee because it's written to please however many demographic areas. If it didn't, it'd have 4 million viewers, the budget of Doctor Who circa 1990, and station heads sharpening the axe.

People can handle the truth. It's just they shouldn't expect to like the truth wrapped up in barbed wire and rammed down their throats. It's fun in an adolescent way to incite, but perhaps what a 19-year-old has learned and a 17-year-old hasn't is that there are good and bad ways to present things to people palatably. Consequently, we might understand why Miles is a serf expected to admire his feudal overlords, because when they got promoted they decided not to help up the guy who pissed on them and their work.

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Here is an amusing quote by Miles from May 2000:

"Look, think of it like this. Eventually, there will be another TV series of Doctor Who. And it will fail horribly, because inevitably it'll be aimed at the kind of fan-targeted SF market that didn't even exist until Star Trek: The Next Generation came along and spoiled everything. Doctor Who only works as a family adventure series, but when it finally comes back you can bet any money you want it'll be like Babylon 5 or something. It'll only last one series, maybe two. So then the TV programme will be dead forever, the license will be in limbo, and nobody will ever want to pump more money into it as a TV concept. Not a live-action TV concept, anyway. But animation's just getting to the point where it's breaking through properly, especially now there's so many computer-generated effects around and people are starting to forget the difference between "real" film and CGI. Pretty soon, British animation companies... the Cosgrove-Halls of the twenty-first century... are going to realize that there's a massive amount of potential in a British Manga-style movement. We're the perfect country to do that kind of thing, to do the European equivalent of Akira or Ghost in the Shell or whatever. And I want to be there when it happens, and I can't think of a better spearhead for the whole thing than an anime version of Doctor Who. I'm thinking ten years into the future here, obviously."

So it's quite hilarious that now his prediction hasn't come true, he often seems to be criticising Who precisely FOR being a fan-targeted family adventure series. I think he may be one of those professional underminers of the dannyno ilk: they'll come up with a checklist of impossible demands and insist that it was non-negotiable that they all be met. Start meeting them of course and a mysterious new list of impossible demands materialises, as the point isn't actually to make things better, it's to piss off the establishment. See also: members of the voting public for whom each successive government is THE WORST EVER. They rally people from their computer desks to go out and teach New Labour or whoever a damn good lesson at the polling station, seemingly without any awareness that nothing any government could ever realistically do would actually make them happy.

Ahem. For the record, anyway, I think Doctor Who is in a relative golden age at the moment: we get more screentime per year than at any time since the 1960s, and even a subpar episode now is guaranteed to be chock full of much more interesting stuff than 90% of even the supposed halcyon days of the 70s. Forty-five more years!

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Mm. It's probably an anarchist thing, never being satisfied with the world. Probably extends from your beloved political system is nowhere close being enacted anywhere, and so stupidly extreme it'll never be enacted anyway.

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I think you underestimate how fannish new Who is, just as Miles in the old quote verlaine uses underestimated how fannish it could be. Now we're in the age of DVD box sets and iPlayer, the sort of long foreshadowing, in-jokes and hints which were once strictly for the hardcore are the norm in talking point TV shows, which can still get massive ratings even while they're engaged in self-referential geekery. And thank heavens for that.

Note also that Miles, for all his faults, is not wholly against the new series; root around the rest of the blog and he has a lot of good things to say, especially about Eccleston and (controversially, perhaps) Russell T Davies.

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Though of course, there is a *big* concession to casual viewers nowadays, to wit that the vast majority of episodes are now self-contained. Even if it contains story arc elements, the average episode of Doctor Who is now way more satisfying to Joe Public. I mean, imagine it's 1989 and you just happen to tune into the second or third episode of Ghost Light... you wouldn't have a clue what was going on.

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Yes and no. 'The Long Game', off the top of my head, only really made sense in the context of the series. But, there was enough there for it to be a watchable light satire/monster story in and of itself, so people who don't really pay attention still get something out of the experience.

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Hmm, I think The Long Game was a complete story in and of itself, but that it was largely without interest or merit except in its contributions to Season 1's story arc. Far from RTD's finest hour, in my book.

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Miles seems to have fallen prey the most insidious possible criticism of others - "that's not how I would have done it".

A story set in a library *has* to be about reading? Throwing a sop to young viewers of Doctor Who as well as to 30+ year-old fanboys who should know better is *bad*? Gaiman maybe wanted girls to read his comics, ergo is just trying to get off with them? There were no gay men in 1941?

Actually, I might give him the one about the library - it would be a bit of a waste of the "biggest library in the universe" to use it just as a planet-sized frame for one book, even if that book does have a nifty Tardis cover.

But even if you're right more than never, once you accuse others of the cardinal sin of not doing it how you would have done, you're gone. They're going to carry on doing it not how you would have done *for the rest of your life*, and everything you ever see will be shit.

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Something else just occurred to me.

Gaiman has semi-rumoured, in an "I haven't got the gig" way, that he's been talking to Moffat about writing an episode of Doctor Who. If he eventually does, then please remind me of the existence of this guy, so that I can watch the explosion...

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I'm pretty sure Miles must be in the rumour loop about that one too - maybe this is a "getting my retaliation in first" kind of thing, so he can point and say "told you so" when the official announcement of the writers Moffat has been courting for 2010 is made.

I hate Gaiman and his infinite susceptibility to tweeness as much as anybody, but if he can bring to the Doctor Who table something of the creepy ilk of Coraline, I'll be very happy. Just please, no damn faeries...

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But *sometimes* "that's not how I would have done it" is a valid complaint. I suppose it's not really in those words, so much as "if I'd done it it would have been like X Y Z, which is clearly much better."

My example of this is the finale of Ecclestone's reign, which was a stupid bag of Deus Ex Machina [all too literally] shite, which also incidentally revealed that "Bad Wolf", which had been building up to a crescendo reveal, was in fact a totally meaningless piece of twaddle.

Whereas if I'd been doing it, Rose would have been accidentally sent back to a bit before her own time (before the first instance of Bad Wolf was seen), and would, using her knowledge of the future, have become wealthy enough to set up a trust to look after the Tardis. The participants would mark its location "Bad Wolf", inspired by the fact that Rose had seen it written on the Tardis that one time. "That one time" would, of course, be actually a member of the trust who found the *earlier* (show-chronology) Tardis, thought it was the one they're meant to be watching, and tagged it, thus forming an enjoyable paradox.

This would resolve the dalek situation in the future because one of the things Rose will have arranged in the distant past is that the Tardis be taken up to the TV satellite in the future - where we saw, you may recall, Bad Wolf written on something for no apparent reason.

The Doctor, in a pinchy situation with the daleks and having sent his Tardis away, will either figure out this connection or Rose will phone him a message with her magic phone or a member of the Bad Wolf trust will hand him a letter to this effect. He can then retrieve the Tardis and defeat the daleks using it, in some more interesting way than "and then the god in the machine fixed it all the end". Sacrificing himself in the process, I suppose, since he wanted to be replaced.

I particularly like my version of the story because it involves the Tardis time travelling the long way. There are nice poetic things that could be said about this in the dialogue.

I firmly believe that this is how that episode would have been if Moffat had written it rather than Davies Ex Machina.

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That's RTD's modus operandi all over. For the head writer of a (supposedly) science fiction show, he's comparatively uninterested in hows or whys.

I was irked a lot by the Bad Wolf episode too: I could see that it was a pretty cool idea, from a marketing perspective at least, to have the Doctor turn up in the Big Brother house, and Rose on The Weakest Link. But just WHY were these shows still "on the air", with minor concept tweaks, 30 centuries into the future or however long it was? HOW could it be possible that the best means for the Daleks to harvest genetic material was this elaborate setup of deadly reality TV shows? I still don't have a clue.

I made my peace with this in the Xmas special though. There's that bit where the Sycorax warlord has been whipping humans to death left right and centre with his laser flail, then he tries it on the pyjamaed Doctor who just pulls it out of his hand by the lethal end and throws it away without a word of explanation. Now they could have explained this away with just a line of pseudoscience about human and Gallifreyan physiological difference, but in hindsight would that have really have been worth the time and effort? Isn't it better just to have cool things happening a lot, without having to spend ten minutes of every episode explaining them all very slowly?

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But *sometimes* "that's not how I would have done it" is a valid complaint.

True. You can say, "here are some changes I'd have made if I'd seen your script, which would have been better than what you did", and it be entirely healthy. You could even say, "here's how I would have revived Doctor Who, and your Bad Wolf problem would not even have arisen because I wouldn't have done that in the first place".

But the impression I get from that piece about Moffat is that Miles isn't just suggesting improvements as he sees them. To me he seems to feel that anything he doesn't like is automatically wrong, and possibly dishonourable, because he'd really be there to suggest those improvements, if only they'd asked him. At the point where "not what I would have done" becomes itself a reason to dislike something and to suggest that its creators are fools, you can confidently predict that you're never going to like it, no matter how it turns out.

Of course I could be entirely wrong. Or maybe I'm right but he enjoys hating it. However, the "not what I'd do" criticism is in general something to watch out for, because what it usually tells you is that you aren't going to get constructive criticism other than just doing the whole thing their way. It's certainly a good reason not to want someone on your team, quite aside from the fact that you "don't see eye to eye".

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My warning bells went off when Miles suggested he was into "world-building" in a much bigger way than the RTD/Moffat axis. As a longtime roleplayer I can safely say that obsessive worldbuilders are as much scum as the rules lawyers and the hack-n-slashers and the beer and pretzels crowd. Storytelling is the one true way in the eyes of God! ;)

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World builders are only really good when you get this sneaking suspicion that they must be making it all up as they go along, because otherwise how could that conjunction of events possibly have turned out so cool?

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Would it be too gauche to question why Gaiman is apparently so horrble? Jackie speaks well of his stuff & from what little of it I've read so far it isn't ThaT Bad.

'Sides I've always liked Moffat's episodes before.

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Gaiman's okay really, just way too successful considering the slenderness of his talents, like a sort of Goth-boy JK Rowling. And smug about it too. I think may be a vaguely British trait in me, not to be able to admire someone's success unless it's a major uphill struggle for them.

Moffat is a great Doctor Who writer who hasn't disappointed me with an episode yet. I do think there's been a certain amount of formula to his scripts so far ("if the record's stopped, how come we can still hear the child", "if the clock's broken, how come we can still hear the ticking" etc etc), but that might be true for any writer, in all fairness.

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He's British AND he's smug? Who woulda thunk?

As for Moffat, there is the ol' adage of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'. If something works really well & most people seem to like it, it does make sense to keep doing it. Though a little change does make for nice flavour now & again.

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Gaiman is certainly more interesting (to me) and much less successful (at making money) than Rowling. What he certainly is, for better or worse, is more alternative and more interlechewul than JK Rowling. With the possible exception of any Jill Murphy fandom, nobody can claim that JK has raided their little indie niche.

Obviously I can name writers I think are more talented, who shift a lot less units. I expect so could Neil Gaiman, he's surely not that arrogant. But we all know that's not how any creative industry works. For me he doesn't anywhere near approach the level of "I wish people wouldn't put up with this rubbish".

What I do think is that he's more mainstream than he "has a right" to be. He's too successful for a writer of fiction principally concerning anthropomorphic personifications of abstract principles and their relation to myth, story and contemporary reality. If that makes sense. There "shouldn't" be fame and fortune in that, because only terribly clever people should like it. And someone else[*] probably does it better. Gaiman has the audacity to be a best seller, but also enough cool alternative people like him to suggest credibility.

Crossover potential. As soon as any artist realises it, they're accused of being either a hack imitator or a sellout. Or in this case a parasite. I dunno, maybe Miles has evidence that Gaiman gets up to no good with underage goths in hotel rooms as Eastercon, but if so I've (mercifully) not heard about it.

* Alan Moore.

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Lawrence Miles, who still always makes me laugh, had a big go at the Beatles the other week, for having nothing new or original in their repertoire, only the skill of packaging other people's stuff in such an incredibly accessible and unobjectionable way that massive success was guaranteed. I feel the same way about Gaiman - he's in the B-league as far as comic book innovators and visionaries go, but he's the one getting the doubtless lucrative TV, movie and book deals now because he's so much more eager to please. And where Alan Moore has to publically disassociate himself with the travesties of his work inflicted on cinema audiences, Gaiman sounded quite pleased with the significant rewrite that was Stardust, possibly because (in my opinion anyway) they made it about twice as good as the original.

For me Gaiman is pretty much the Malcolm McLaren of fantasy... a guy who was lucky enough to be hanging around at the same time as a whole bunch of zeitgeist-altering geniuses, and ultimately the most successful of all of them despite a comparatively small talent for invention, due to a comparatively huge talent for marketing and self-promotion.

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a comparatively huge talent for marketing and self-promotion.

Didn't his success all just stem from Good Omens?

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In the UK, probably yes. In US editions, Good Omens is by "Gaiman and Pratchett" rather than "Pratchett and Gaiman".

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had a big go at the Beatles the other week

I'm not greatly surprised - people occasionally say the same thing about the Rolling Stones, or the Sex Pistols, or Nirvana, or Radiohead. Especially the Sex Pistols. They all worked out of a genre occupied by a bunch of very smug fans who know they've got something that's better than the dross that the common herd likes, thus proving their superiority as consumers, and created something that the common herd likes. It must be like having to let women into your cricket club.

a whole bunch of zeitgeist-altering geniuses

This is the thing - Moore and Morrison (and Miller if you must) and others changed comics, thus improving the world for the comics fan. Gaiman made people read comics who weren't comics fans, improving the world for them. Guess who gets noticed first by the 99% of the world that doesn't read comics?

And Alan Moore took his name off V for Vendetta without ever seeing the script - there was a huge fight in which Joel Silver (the producer) told the press that Moore had seen what the Wachowskis were doing and was very excited. This was technically a lie, since although Moore apparently had spoken to them about the possibility of a film, many years previously, he'd heard nothing recently and could not accurately be described as "excited". Moore, perhaps because of the shit that DC (now owned by Warner) had put him through in the past, of course demanded that Warner issue an apology for fraudulently using his endorsement. Things went downhill from there.

So while it's quite true that Moore has dissociated himself from the travesties, he didn't do it because they were travesties, he did it because he doesn't play well with lying, cheating mega-corps. Gaiman knows they lie and cheat, and is willing to play anyway, and they have rewarded him for that.

If Miles is right that Gaiman clinically contrives his plots to appeal to the demographic, it's curious that you consider this to be a marketing skill. Moore does the same thing, but because it's a smaller demographic he's a zeitgest-defining genius...

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Radiohead created something that the common herd likes out of a difficult, inaccessible, members-only genre? Are you sure you've got their discography in the correct chronological order?

Of course, one of the nice things about the general public is they constantly surprise you by actually embracing stuff that is really good and interesting after they get exposed to it. Either that or they just keep buying Radiohead albums because they know they're meant to because they're the biggest band in the world, which is a horrifying possibility.

I dispute that Morrison and Moore "contrive plots for their demographic". I think that's getting the cart and the horse backwards: Morrison is the guy who, in an early gig writing for the Zoids (children's dinosaur toy) spinoff comic, ushered in the apocalypse in a story that features Zoidzilla stepping through a silvery liquid into "the Hyperverse of the Mind". On 2000AD Moore persistently raised the stakes in the one-offs he did for the likes of Rogue Trooper and Ro-Busters (see also: Batman The Killing Joke) and crumpled up and threw away the formula that every other writer there was working to with The Ballad of Halo Jones.

These aren't writers who contrive stuff for a demographic, these are writers restlessly trying to break free of the constraints the medium and its publishers are imposing on them. Gaiman, well sure, he wrote a comic that girls could enjoy, in the same patronising vein that Joss Whedon wrote a TV series empowering/pedestalising ditzy blonde chicks. But give him a brief and he works slavishly within it, instead of pushing the envelope at all. Give me Promethea or Lost Girls any day: if Moore is writing for a demographic, it's a demographic that found *him*, not the other way around.

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I'm not saying Moore or Morrison followed a standard formula or that they weren't zeitgeist-altering geniuses. I'm saying that it's ridiculous to hold "writing things you think your audience might want to read" as a sin. Everybody does it, even if it is sometimes fashionable to pretend you only work for yourself[*]. Moore had more faith in his audience than any of his publishers ever did: that doesn't mean he inhabited some pure bubble untainted by the corrupting influence of wanting to be seen. But Miles seems to be making it an accusation against both Moffat and Gaiman that they do something everyone else does too. Coming from someone who *isn't* popular at all, that just sounds like an excuse: "I could have done what you did, but it's evil, so I didn't".

If you reckon Gaiman just writes the same thing everyone else does, then that's a separate (and more worthwhile) criticism than Miles's that he writes things that people enjoy reading.

And yes, Radiohead did popularise musical elements that didn't have mass appeal without their influence. Yorke has said himself that he doesn't think Kid A or Amnesiac are challenging compared with music they listen to and which influences them. I try to believe people bought the albums because they like the way Radiohead do it, rather than because they think they ought to like Radiohead, but you never know.

But I was more thinking how pissed off the arch-indies of the 80s are when 80,000 people sing along to "Creep", or I-don't-know-how-many million people buy OK Computer, despite having only the faintest idea who The Smiths were. It's not far from someone reading Sandman even though Morrison's either a bit much for them, or else they've never even heard of him. Or thinking that Nirvana invented grunge.

Mind you, I would like to point out that to the extent they're comparable I'm more impressed by Radiohead than by Gaiman - I don't want this to turn into a "Gaiman's rubbish", "no he isn't he's perfect, he's as great as Radiohead" effort. But he attracts some of the same "you've succeeded beyond your rightful box, so you must be populist drivel after all" attention, which was conspicuously absent around the time that Pablo Honey and Sandman weren't really selling yet.

* I've also heard Harlan Ellison say that he doesn't want his readers to like his work: he wants them to feel they've been savaged by it. So maybe he's writing what he thinks his demographic should read, rather than what he thinks they want to read...

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