Matthew: 24:15, 16, 21
*
I gave up on Doctor Who when Peter Davidson was still the Doctor, so I didn't see this weekend's episode nor do I intend to. By all accounts, it featured male aliens giving birth. I don't quite know what to do or say or think or feel about this. I was absolutely stunned when I read the report in the press this morning. It made me feel a bit sick, if I'm honest. It's a slight exaggeration to say it knocked me for six but it certainly affected me and has played on my mind all day.
What I'm not going to do is put a picture up or provide a link - it's in all the papers anyway - or waste any time mourning a show I always thought was vastly overrated, even in 1975. I found it arch and pretentious - long before I even knew what those words meant - while Dr. Who fans, in our playground at least, always struck me as colossal bores. So apologies to any 'Whovians' out there. It's probably my fault to be fair. I'm so rubbish at science and so uninterested in it that I don't think I was ever able to grasp the show's basic premise.
So while it's something of a stretch to call Doctor Who a 'holy place' as in the passage from Saint Matthew above, the programme always had something quintessentially and eccentrically English about it, something - despite all my reservations and irritations - rather precious and unique, something which covered and transcended a multitude of failings. I think that's why what happened last night has come as a real blow to those of us with a faith in Albion and Logres who work constantly in ways great and small for this island's spiritual regeneration. A vicious, calculated and deliberate spoiling has taken place.
Maybe that's why this show appears to have been particularly targeted by what the French/Romanian esotericist, Jean Parvulesco, called 'agents of dissolution'? Who knows? But it's incredible to think that this is what licence payers actually pay to have pumped into their living rooms. It's like the Devil rubbing his hands and laughing at what used to be called England.
The only dealings I have with the BBC is to check the weather on their website and keep tabs on the football. But if this kind of thing goes any deeper or becomes more prevalent then I'll have to think about an alternative provider.
But where to turn? We can see now why people start watching Russia Today or Al Jazeera.
I like to end all my posts with what the film director, Robert Bresson, called 'an open door'. I don't like to end on a down note, but tonight I'm going to. It feels like something important has happened and that a real Rubicon has been crossed. We have to feel its weight.
If there was such a thing as a Requiem Mass for this country broadcast on YouTube I'd go and watch it now.
3 comments:
It might make more sense if the aliens were giant seahorses.
I'm completely with you on this, John. It's a classic case of subversion and inversion, corrupting thought and imagination. In a way all TV is like this but Dr Who is an example of the process at its most brazenly obvious. Amazingly this current series is getting ratings that are higher than practically anything else, around 7 million apparently not including the people who watch it on catch up after it's gone out. I suppose its popularity is one reason it's the focus of so much corruption. Thank goodness my children have no interest in it.
Thanks William. 'Thank goodness my children have no interest in it.' Who'd have thought in the 1980s that just 30 years later wise and perceptive people would be saying this about Dr. Who?
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