17Requiem Productions

I’ve been meaning to write a blog about Doctor Who for a while now. As one of my favourite TV shows, let alone sci-fi shows, it’s been keeping me blissfully entertained since it returned to television in 2005. To my mind, the actors portraying the Doctor since its revamp are fantastic, and every time a new Doctor arrives my initial scepticism is blown away.

I liked Matt Smith’s portrayal of the title character since those final few moments of The End of Time (David Tennant’s final appearance as Doctor number 10); here was a Doctor who wasn’t going to fall in love with his human companion, who saw things through an alien viewpoint, and his portrayal has harked back to when the Doctor was an extra-terrestrial, as opposed to the human-with-two-hearts idea which has been en vogue since Paul McGann tried his hand in the role (and for the record, Paul McGann’s 8th Doctor is my second favourite Doctor). I don’t mind the human portrayal, but it’s also nice to buck the trend, which is something the 11th Doctor does in spades.

But this is more of a rant than a tribute, I’m afraid.

Steven Moffat took the reigns after Tennant’s final stint and decided to act the teenager. As teenagers do when they leave their parents, they rebel. So the wallpaper changed – new logo, new theme tune, new sonic screwdriver, new companion – and so did the entire format of the show. Gone was the deep characterisation that made the new series so strong, to be replaced with pithy one-liners from Amy Pond, if only to allow her to live up to the sassy label everyone was so keen to lump onto her. This lack of characterisation made the Doctor better, in my opinion; he seemed utterly eccentric, mad at times and brilliant always. Amy Pond, on the other hand, just got lost in the series, starting out as a great idea for a character and turning into something in the background to constantly annoy the viewer.

All of this I forgive. It’s the evolution of the series that makes it what it is, and there are several stand out episodes from 11′s first series (these being the stirring Vincent and the Doctor, The Lodger (despite James Corden) and The Eleventh Hour). The two gripes I have about the series revolve around Steven Moffat.

Moffat was the undisputed hero of the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who, providing the series with the darkest, cleverest and most satisfying episodes, not to mention terrifying at times. But it seems that he’s gotten too big for his boots. “Let’s just change everything.” It just seems a little desperate, especially since the budget this time around isn’t high enough to meet the expectations laid down. He’s bigged up and bigged up and bigged up and what is actually produced is on a par with the wooden sets of the 70s.

But it’s the new announcement that the next series of Doctor Who is going to be split up to allow more gimmicky “event episodes” which gets me really annoyed. What the series was so good at was the writing and the characters. Instead of concentrating on such a thing – which, if done well, can completely outshine the budgetary constraints (see Clerks, for example, where the dialogue was fantastic) – he’s opting for the easy option of ratings winning cliffhangers.

I’m trying not to hate, here. Blink, The Girl in the Fireplace and the Silence In The Library episodes are my ultimate favourites of the revamp, and like I said, I love Matt Smith’s Doctor. It’s the fact that I love the series so much that makes me angry when it seems like power is being abused. What I’m essentially getting at here, is: Steven Moffat, stop trying so hard. You’re an amazing writer, so let the writing win out!

I suppose that’s it. I do have more to say on the matter, but I’m boring you as it is.

It’s almost as though I’m living in a world exactly the same in almost every way to my usual planet earth, but with a few small, subtle changes. Like when indie band Feeder, known for their catchy guitar pop and their deeper, more emotional lyrics put out a video like this, for example.

I’ve loved Feeder for years, when their music was great stuff to dance to in the indie clubs I used to frequent back in Manchester. But then Pushing The Senses came out and I started listening to their lyrics. This was great stuff. I went back, and it was always like this, but instead of the keys and the orchestra there was a loud, angry guitar. The songs themselves were masterpieces.

I simplify things. Their second studio album, for example, featured strings. What I’m trying to say is that their music has always had a core of soulful, mature feeling behind it.

Which seems to have evaporated completely with their latest offering, Renegades. Gone is the maturity of their masterpiece sixth album Silent Cry, replaced instead by the angry guitar of their first offerings. That’s fine. In fact, the title track – the video to which I’ve linked above – is a really great song, nice and catchy with a chorus you can sing to. But it’s not just the guitars which have turned back time; it seems the band themselves want to hark back to their youth, and so themes of being the outcasts and rebels and all that good stuff teenagers love prevail in almost every song.

It’s annoying for those of us who love the band that they seem to have reached their peak of mature, brilliant, epic music and then reject that for cheap kicks. Don’t get me wrong, I love cheap kicks, but it’s not what I’d expected from Feeder. And their new “look, kids! Tits!” video, along with the album itself, just screams of a pathetic mid-life crisis.

So I’m kind of in an angry mood today which is why I needed to write something in the first place. But there we have it.

The thing about me is that I just cannot seem to work out what I’m supposed to “do” with my life. It’s not a daunting project. It’s not something that scares me. It’s just more of an annoyance accompanied with a lacklustre malaise. Every frigging film and TV show seems to be shoving “you only get one life, so live it” and various other related clichés down my throat. The one I most abhor being “live every day as though it were your last,” which for an unemployed ‘artist’ (read ‘wanker’) with no money or qualifications or prospects is a particular kick in the teeth. If this truly were my last day, it was spent playing Fable II, reading the entire Scott Pilgrim series and being incredibly hungry.

Admittedly, hunger aside, that’s not a bad day. Nor is it, however, packed full of wonder, adventure and self discovery.

I know what I want to do with my life; I want to be a graphic novelist. I want to write and illustrate graphic novels, or a webcomic, or anything of that ilk. I want to do cartoons for a living. I realise that this is an incredibly difficult thing to do; for every Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Bryan Lee O’Malley and Jeph Jacques out there, there are thousands more artists and writers wanting to break into the field, each with talent comparable to those I’ve listed. And for every one of them, there are millions more with as much talent as my waste product after curry night. The market isn’t simply saturated, it’s flooded, and so you get brilliant works of fiction and art just ignored and unloved.

For the record, I’m not claiming to be a member of this category; I don’t think I’m half bad these days and my talents and skills are only going to improve with constant practice, but I’m certainly not at the stage at which I could sell my works for billions and feel justified in doing so. And in fact, for the record, I think this saturation is fantastic; it’s people putting creative ideas onto paper (or screen) and that should always be encouraged. If I read a different comic every hour until I died, I would never have even scratched the surface, which is a fucking brilliant thing if you think about it.

I get really down when I see things people I want to be doing the things I want to do; this week, for example, sees the San Diego Comic Con, where anyone who’s anyone flocks to this mecca of all things geek. It’s a testament to the power of the internet that my favourite webcomic artists, the people whose strips I’ve been reading for years, get their own stalls and meet and greet their fans; webcomics are comics at their most grass roots – works of fiction and fact (to some degree) available to view free of charge to a society of millions who may in ordinary circumstances be unable to view such work – and the whole subsection of both comics and the internet have become a community, and it’s brilliant that even with my piece of shit offering of a webcomic a random steampunk from Manchester can become part of something bigger. But given the nature of these comics, money being made from advertising and merchandise sales, it’s become even more difficult to truly stand out in the market and make a name for yourself.

I dream of being one day able to make a living from doing what I love, of being respected and accepted amongst people I currently admire, and indeed from the aforementioned global society of readers. I dream of being able to attend the Comic Con in San Diego as an artist, on a panel or at a stall, greeting enthusiastic people from the internet who know more about my comic than I do. It upsets me a lot when these people who do do what I love and then complain about it, as though it’s a chore for them, or that it’s work.

I dream of being one day invited to attend San Diego Comic Con as an artist and thinking of it as a pain in the arse. When this happens, I know I’ll have made it.