Retrospective: Andrew Cartmel by John Seavey 7/2/04
When Doctor Who fans think of Andrew Cartmel, they immediately think of the Seventh Doctor; before Virgin published anything other than novelizations of the televised episodes, Cartmel had already established himself as a major force in the Doctor Who creative pantheon with his tenure as script editor of the show. He did a lot to reinvent the lead character in the final years of the series, re-establishing him as a man of mystery and magic and bringing in an element of manipulation to the character -- Cartmel's Doctor isn't an explorer of the universe so much as a grand-master playing chess against it. Some traditional fans claimed that he'd gone too far... but when the time came for Virgin to begin the New Adventures, Cartmel's books for the Doctor Who series (Cat's Cradle: Warhead, Warlock, Warchild, and the later Foreign Devils for Telos Press) showed that if anything, he'd been restraining himself.
The three books for Virgin, Warhead, Warlock, and Warchild, are frequently referred to as a trilogy, but they don't really take a single plot and progress it as trilogies usually do. Rather, they're three distinct and separate novels that share common characters and themes, and many of these shared themes involve the vision of the Doctor that Cartmel had when he was script editor for the program. In fact, he pushes these boundaries so far that at times, the Doctor doesn't seem like the same character we see elsewhere in the books and on TV; he's more judgemental and less compassionate, acting almost as a supernatural force in defense of Earth against its own inhabitants. (Indeed, a common theme running through all four of Cartmel's books is an acceptance that magic is just as real as science, if not moreso -- a complete departure from established Who canon prior to his tenure on the series, but now just accepted as another aspect in the highly flexible Whoniverse.) Cartmel's Doctor also amps up his manipulative tendencies; in Warhead, his first novel, the Doctor works behind the scenes for the entire novel, appearing only in a few short sequences in the middle and at the end. (Of course, Cartmel adheres to long Doctor Who tradition by having the plan spectacularly collapse at the end, forcing the Doctor to succeed through a combination of luck and brilliant improvisation.)Warhead also introduces Justine and Vincent, who would become in many ways the central focus of the trilogy.
Warlock doesn't pick up the story of 'Warhead' at all, though; instead, it takes the central characters of Warlock and involves them, along with several new characters introduced in the second book, in an entirely different story. But again, the Doctor stays predominantly "off-screen"; most of the book is devoted to Ace and to Creed McIlveen, one of the new characters created. The Doctor steps onto the stage at the end to set things right, but Cartmel still tries to keep him very much at arm's length from the reader... and, in long-standing Doctor Who tradition, the Doctor's way of setting things right is haphazard, succeeds in no small part through chance, and leaves a lot of loose ends lying around waiting to blow up in someone else's face.
Warchild, the final book in the trilogy, concerns itself mostly with wrapping up those loose ends, and is as such rather light on plot. In fact, all of Cartmel's books are fairly light on plot, but that doesn't seem to concern him over-much; Cartmel writes very much to evoke a sensation of tangibility in the reader, a feeling that one could literally step into the scene he's describing. As such, he spends a lot of time describing the sensations, the emotions, the details of a scene to great effect; his books have a very immersive quality to them. It does mean that he takes a lot of time to describe very simple events, though; Warlock, which is one of the longer Doctor Who books, takes almost fifty pages to describe a drug bust. It's almost the opposite approach to writers like Lawrence Miles and Ben Aaronovich, although it's not without its charms.
Until relatively recently, the 'War' trilogy summed up Cartmel's contributions to prose Who, but he did contribute to Telos' line of Doctor Who novellas with Foreign Devils. This is a slice of nostalgia, which seems almost surprising coming from an author like Cartmel; still, you can see his stylistic influences creeping in on the cozy and traditional Second Doctor. It's a world where magic exists and the Doctor knows it (indeed, the book acts as a cross-over with an early 1900s character named Carnacki, an investigator into the spiritual world.) Cartmel's attention might be elsewhere, but his interest in Doctor Who has, apparently, not yet entirely faded.
A Review by Howard Martin 22/3/10
Have you heard the news? It's all over the Web! Well, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but if you Google "Sylvester McCoy & Sophie Aldred & Andrew Cartmel & Margaret Thatcher" I'm sure you'll find it. That's how I found this article by Stephen Adams on telegraph.co.uk, headlined: "Doctor Who 'had anti-Thatcher agenda' Left-wing script writers infiltrated Doctor Who to give it anti-Thatcher plot lines in the late 1980s in a failed attempt to 'overthrow the Government' Sylvester McCoy has claimed." The article goes on to tell us that "McCoy ... and Andrew Cartmel ... both admitted the conspiracy, saying that it 'seemed like the right thing to do'. It further quotes McCoy: "'Our feeling was that Margaret Thatcher was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered'". Still further on in the article: "Cartmel said it was almost a job requirement to detest Thatcher. When asked by John Nathan-Turner ... what he hoped to achieve in being the show's script editor, he recalled: 'My exact words were: I'd like to overthrow the government. I was a young firebrand and I wanted to answer honestly. I was very angry about the social injustice in Britain under Thatcher and I'm delighted that came into the show.'" Sophie Aldred chimes in a little later, calling this obligatory hatred of Margaret Thatcher "a real bonding process". What can I say? I haven't been this amused by half-assed social activism since I saw a commercial many years ago in which Elton John urged us all to join him in his fight against AIDS. Yessir, Elton. Just lemme get my trusty microscope and I'll join you in your HIV-research lab, shall I?
Now you may say this really isn't much of a scoop. Liberalism has been the dominant political opinion amongst Doctor Who production teams since 1963, and Andrew Cartmel and his gang were always so in-your-face with it. What surprised me here was just how central the political angle was to the way they ruined Doctor Who. I knew that a certain percentage of the original series' problems during its final years was the result of Cartmel and Co's insane obsession with Margaret Thatcher, but I assumed this was no more a factor in stymieing their imaginations than, say, Cartmel's obsession with comic books or Gormenghast. But it turns out political activism was head and shoulders above all the other baggage, the baggage that all the others had to take a backseat to.
Seriously Sylv, "Margaret Thatcher was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered"? Maybe during your era, but I think in Doctor Who's salad days there might have been a few that were scarier. I admit that I'm not an expert on the lady, but what little I have heard about her doesn't exactly put her up there with Stalin and Hitler. It should perhaps be borne in mind that I admitted in my Remembrance of the Daleks review that I don't find the seventh Doctor dark and sinister, so perhaps I have unreasonable standards for real-life villains as well. I don't know whether or not her privatizing various government-run industries or cutting welfare benefits was good for Britain, but I still suspect most of us, including those who were adversely affected by her policies, would sooner live in her Britain than in the Soviet Union of the same time (glasnost and perestroika included) or the Argentina of the military junta that tried to annex the Falklands. And while skimming her entry in Wikipedia for this review (not, I admit, the most exhaustive form of research, but a lot more I'd wager than most of Mrs. Thatcher's detractors have done) I was surprised to read the following: "Thatcher was one of few Conservative MPs to support Leo Abse's Bill to decriminalize male homosexuality and voted in favour of David Steel's Bill to legalise abortion, as well as a ban on hare coursing." Not exactly what I'd expect from a right-wing hatemonger. My point here isn't to prop up Mrs. Thatcher; as I admitted before, for all I know many of her policies might genuinely have been bad ones. But not bad enough to make compelling science-fiction adventures out of, which probably explains why the stories during the McCoy years always seemed to be missing something. In other words, it might explain why the seventh Doctor spent so much of his time in England, battling nothing more unpleasant at the end of the day than stiff upper lips and narrow minds.
But I don't want to be too hard on Sylvester McCoy or Sophie Aldred. After all, as much encouragement as they may have given Andrew Cartmel in his quest to "overthrow the government", they really weren't responsible for his subordinating the realism of the series to his sociopolitical fantasies and they certainly had no part in sieving the pool of available writers to make sure only anti-Thatcherites made it in the door. That hating Margaret Thatcher "was almost a job requirement" highlights a problem that goes beyond politics and that dogs the program to this day. In the past I thought that John Nathan-Turner gave Andrew Cartmel so much leeway because Eric Saward's stormy departure scared him into being less of a control freak. But after reading Stephen Adams's article I now think it probably came down to the two men recognizing each other on some subconscious level as kindred spirits. Both preferred to work with people who always agreed with them. Saward regularly complained that JN-T refused to hire old writers and directors who knew the Doctor Who ropes because he feared they would undermine his authority, and it's notable that so many of the writers and directors who worked on the series during his tenure as producer were his close friends and/or people he'd worked with before. Andrew Cartmel probably wasn't a control freak to such a neurotic degree, but clearly he couldn't bring himself to work closely with anybody who didn't share his political beliefs and literary tastes. When he asked Marc Platt if he was a Mervyn Peake fan shortly after they first met I suspect this was a test as much as it was making conversation.
In previous eras of Doctor Who, the script editor/writer relationship, while rarely adversarial, often benefitted from a certain amount of tension. Writer would pitch his idea; script editor would say he liked it but change this; writer would say "I really don't want to change that"; script editor would say "You have to 'cause that idea sucks"; writer would say "Okay, how about this instead"; script editor would say "Yeah, let's see how that works out"; etc. The only time I've heard of Andrew Cartmel putting his foot down with one of his writers was when he told Ben Aaronovitch he couldn't have a floating platform like Skeletor's from the live action He-Man and the Masters of the Universe movie in Remembrance of the Daleks, and that was probably due to budget constraints rather than the more sensible reason that there just wasn't any place for it in the script. Modern Doctor Who may no longer be out to change the British political landscape, but its unbearably saccharine content indicates a production team that continues this let's-all-be-friends system. Examine the writing credits on each of the new stories and you can be forgiven for thinking that you're looking at a series of Virgin New Adventures book spines. And one notable exception: fandom's most notable player hater, Lawrence Miles. I'd be very surprised if the creative tension between writer and script editor on the new series ever goes beyond an argument over what they should get on their pizzas when they have to pull an all-nighter.
When reading the Remembrance of the Daleks reviews, I noticed that more than one of the reviewers praised the new confidence the series evinced from that point onward. This was another byproduct of Cartmel's political naivety and I don't think it worked. Confidence doesn't automatically translate into competence, and any writer who possesses too much of it runs the risk of not being able to spot the flaws in his own work, as evidenced by the numerous plot holes in that story. With Remembrance of the Daleks, Cartmel and Aaronovitch, convinced that their absurd little communist cell could change the world, contributed squat to Thatcher's ultimately vacating the office of Prime Minister, but did manage to produce a very silly and in some ways rather embarrassing (albeit entertaining - I stick by the 5-out-of-10 rating I gave it) four episodes.
The revelation of Cartmel's secret get-Thatcher-out-of-office plot has forced me to rethink another of my long-held beliefs. When Andrew Cartmel claimed after watching The Seeds of Doom and The Talons of Weng-Chiang that the Doctor had once been an all-powerful and all-knowing superhero, and that recently he had become a "patsy" prone to being knocked out, tied up, and locked up without it being part of his plan, I assumed he had watched those stories through the prism of his comic-book-infused imagination. The Doctor is after all tied up twice in The Seeds of Doom without apparently having planned it that way, and on the second occason has to be rescued by Sarah from Harrison Chase's fertilizer machine. And in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, getting gunned down by Mr. Sin and locked up in one of Magnus Greel's storerooms doesn't appear to be part of his plan to rescue Jago and Lightfoot. Both stories show the Doctor as vulnerable to physical attack and capable of falling into unexpected traps from which he often needs help extricating himself. Now I know Cartmel's mind was actually clouded by politics as he watched those two stories. He just looked at Tom Baker's off-beat clothes and casual manner with authority figures, and the character's weaknesses - as much elements in separating him from run-of-the-mill, cookie-cutter heroes as his legendary eccentricity and mysteriousness - didn't even register. Cartmel's fourth Doctor is an idealized version of Cartmel himself: a smug, hip, antiestablishment vigilante totally impervious to all the slings and arrows cast at him by the blue-blooded country club fascists he so despises and defeats without having to fire a shot (physical force after all is so very Thatcheresque). God knows what Cartmel made of Sarah. He probably didn't even notice she was in The Seeds of Doom. His fourth Doctor doesn't need any rescuing, thank you very much, especially not by some girlie-girl Ace wouldn't deign even to blow up.
Like most examples of Homo politicans, Andrew Cartmel knew that he was right, and that his theories applied to real-world events would soon fix his country. In The Happiness Patrol we weren't just seeing his cockeyed view of what Britain had become during the 1980s, but also the way he truly thought this imaginary mess could be cleaned up. It really is possible, in the minds of people like Andrew Cartmel, to bring down a corrupt tyrant by making her cry. His celebrated "social realism" never went beyond caricatures of middle-class British neighborhoods. His idea of the worst place in the world was Perivale, and when he and Rona Munro brought us to this surprisingly livable hellhole, the real enemy wasn't the Master or the Cheetah People, but the harsh free market and the homegrown monsters it had spawned: the elderly Sergeant Patterson and his rather scrawny survivalist club.
It's all a pity really, because those last three years contained some stories that really could have worked if Andrew Cartmel had been more interested in fixing what was wrong with the scripts in terms of plot and pace, and less so in juicing them up with political propaganda for use in his flimsy crusade against Margaret Thatcher. Take The Happiness Patrol. This one really could have been intelligent social criticism. A constant, maddening facade of happiness really is a trait shared by a lot of right-wingers, and the finished production manages in places to capture the so-sweet-it's-disturbing atmosphere it wants and needs. But there are so many things it gets wrong (especially the awful, copout ending), and while Graeme Curry as writer should get some of the blame, so many of its failings were repeated so often during the seventh Doctor's era that it's hard not lay the lion's share on Andrew Cartmel.
Perhaps I would view Andrew Cartmel more favorably if he had entered the Doctor Who world as a writer, his undisciplined political zeal tempered into something comprehensible and entertaining by a script editor with some idea of what makes a good story. It surprised me no end when I eventually read Warhead and actually liked it, and while in Warlock the most interesting element of the story - a drug that's actually an alien - has to take a backseat to Cartmel's conspiracy-theory-driven take on American law enforcement, he still manages to put together an entertaining graphic-novel-style tale. With Warchild, you can see that he's losing ground, his cynical opinion of American government and love of improbably tortuous plans producing a very farfetched novel - and why didn't anyone at Virgin have the decency to tell him that his the-animals-are-fighting-back stuff really sucked? Foreign Devils is a bit of a yawner, and somehow a second Doctor story set after The Highlanders that doesn't feature much of Jamie seems a little off-kilter. But I was happy to see that Cartmel actually bothered to explain how the Doctor insinuated himself into the Upcott household. That was the type of necessary explanation that was often conspicuous by its absence during his years as script editor.
There's a lesson to be learned here, and it isn't anything preachy like people who don't like Margaret Thatcher should just be grateful that they live in a Western democracy instead of the USSR, or that Doctor Who should only be for fun and never dabble in politics. I would never use either of those two arguments - especially the second - to dissuade any intelligent person from expressing a thoughtful and considered opinion regardless of where in the political spectrum it falls. The lesson here is that, when you're paid to be the script editor of a science-fiction adventure series, your first consideration should be the overall quality of the product, and you should only include a political message in a story if it logically fits within its plot and doesn't detract from its realism. Revelation of the Daleks may have contained a statement against unfettered capitalism but it was first and foremost an engaging story. And, as Eric Saward used to say, it didn't "cheat the audience" by offering easy or nonviolent ways out of situations where they wouldn't succeed in real life. The production team behind the mildly socialist and pacifistic Pertwee era acknowledged that there are bad folks in this universe who can't be talked into suicide, saddened into submission, or bewildered out of existence, and it made an honorable compromise between the world as it should be and the world as it actually is: harsh realism leavened with Barry Letts's gentle Buddhist philosophy and fun Venusian aikido fight scenes.
Another lesson: every now and again, hire writers whose politics you don't entirely agree with. Not only will it protect the atmosphere around the production team from getting too smug and buddy-buddy, but be you right-wing nut or knee-jerk leftie you might actually learn something.