"From the diamond mine to the factory..." by Thomas Cookson 26/12/16
Given New Who's obsession with making prophecies, it seems odd few fans ever talk about Vengeance on Varos. Arguably Doctor Who's most prophetic story of all.
Classic Who reflected the space-race years, where people dreamed about a future of prosperity, technological breakthroughs and colonization of the solar system. A future that was ultimately 'cancelled'. It's rather sad then that the grim, dystopian Vengeance on Varos was the one story to get the future pretty much spot on.
It's like Philip Martin used his research into psychology, human behaviour and soociological experiments (specifically prison power dynamics) to accurately predict our future. One where the sadism of prison brutality became regularly fed to the masses via television, and the more we watch, the more we feel the vicarious power of victimizing the vulnerable, relishing others' suffering with the implicit understanding that it's something they deserve.
Ten years ago, we said Vengeance on Varos predicted Reality TV. But we perhaps failed to realize how much worse it could get. The damage it could do to our society. We probably thought it an unpleasant fad but nothing serious. Perhaps we naively thought it simply couldn't get worse.
The punishment and sadism enforced on Varos literally burns at both ends. We quickly learn this society's sordid entertainment panders as much to people's desire to see those at the top made to suffer for once in their overpriviledged lives, as much as criminals and traitors. Much like I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.
But there's been a disturbing trend with shows like Benefits Street exploiting an inexplicable desire to see the poor and vulnerable suffer further.
For nearly ten years, we've had Jeremy Kyle polluting the airwaves with his reactionary trash, bullying his lower-class talk show guests whilst being protected by his bouncers. Being exactly the kind of ranting Davros that Terry Nation once wrote about getting his comeuppance.
Technically, The Jeremy Kyle Show isn't Reality TV. But it is a more malevolent form of talk show that goes for the same kind of engineered personality clashes, vitriol and general shameless vulgarity that characterised Big Brother. The kind of British talk show that might not have existed or been considered acceptable prior to Big Brother, but worryingly it's also the kind of game-changer that offers no way back. This is what an audience raised on Big Brother now wants from a talk show.
Modern youth seem all about exhibiting emotional imbalances to make a loud, belligerent impression through shouty, tiresome ranting (much like those sad Leisure Hive denziens who still reminisce over year-old forum meltdowns they'd once stirred up long after the rest of the world's moved on). Yet Kyle's programme delights in showing how even such volatile people can be easily manipulated and toyed with and wrapped around his finger, to do as he engineers or coerces.
Talk shows have always been exploitative, but I lament the days of hosts like Kilroy who actually would mediate diplomatically. When moderators actually moderated. Jeremy Kyle seems to get a sinister, sick joy out of taunting and denigrating his guests and antagonising conflicts, and yet somehow emerges looking like the white knight hero of the hour. Much like Warriors of the Deep's Doctor being a deliberate enabler of the very conflict and terrible outcome he's claiming to condemn.
And lately I've been noticing an absurdly moronic, egocentric tendency of his when dealing with the family wino to seriously use the fact that their family chose to phone the show as proof to condemn them for not really wanting to change. I'm sorry, but where I come from, being unwilling to call or partake in his trashy show, no matter how bad your situation, is a sign of basic common sense.
In fact, Sil resembles an accurate parody of Jeremy Kyle. Both are like a little terrier where you never quite know if it's going to lick your hand or try to bite it off. Sil's first onscreen negotiations with the Governor see him quickly go from buttering up to the man to suddenly ranting like a child and demanding compliance. And of course the scene where he's grilling Peri for a confession and ranting "You lying liar!" at her. Peri's stonewalling reaction telling us that this behaviour, this horrendously disgusting way of talking to people, is completely alien to her.
So surely something's gone wrong with our society now when Jeremy Kyle's guests willingly submitting themselves to humiliating interrogations to prove their loyalty to their suspicious-minded partners and even endure lie-detector tests that might potentially misread emotions of the nervous and would likely read nothing whatsoever from psychopaths. I wonder if they're just used to DWP slime-grilling them for proof of their commitment to spending their free days grovelling for work. Dole offices are often female-dominated and very bitchy and gossipy; thus any claimant with new trainers will be noticed and remarked upon with suspicion of how they afforded them. Perhaps they need the inspiration of Pertwee's Doctor arguing "That does not give you the right to subject me to an inquisition!"
The 'you deserved it' or 'you brought it on yourself' is at the heart of this societal attitude. And it's been pointed out for a while that Reality TV is far more predatory than people think in how it selects its volunteers. Often deliberately seeking out those with personality problems who are most likely to crack. In media-studies terms, this particular desired judgement being cemented in the viewer, rendering all ambiguities null and void, is called 'ideological closure'.
In the world of Varos, presumably their media is so banal and monotonous that the masses are instructed to not know better and so 'ideological closure' becomes easy. A media status quo that's never challenged or questioned. Note how Arak's only scepticism about the depicted torture isn't to do with the victim's guilt or innocence but about whether he's faking the pain.
In our modern, 'enlightened' multimedia age, it shouldn't be so easy for the Jeremy Kyle Show to convince us of the validity its hypocritical and cruel value judgements, especially given its inconsistent moral dimension. Unfortunately for most viewers, the guests' immediate appearance is enough to convince them they're obviously reprobates. Thus Jeremy can be as disrespectful as he wants, and when they become provoked, it'll just confirm their guilt. But ultimately the arbiter of ideological closure is those lie-detector results. If they don't convince us (usually because we'd expect their guilt to have some character precedent earlier on), we remain voyeurs of the guests who do instantly treat the results as their ideological closure.
In Benefits Street, the people at rock bottom are left to their own self-destructive devices. And still the ideological consensus remains against these desperate people, because they lack the coherence or clarity of argument to cement a rivalling ideological closure, in the way Boys From the Black Stuff's underclass characters could.
They're written off as irredeemable, even though the life cycle of working-class communities nearly always saw nasty scally youths undergoing brutal rites of passage to become better, community-minded people in adulthood and sometimes even carers for the vulnerable.
It's essential to Varos' broken economy to produce and sell this cheap sadistic entertainment. Torture becomes mass production. Likewise, Reality TV endures because it's enormously inexpensive and easy to produce.
Our own current recession is why so many make excuses for the government relentlessly punishing and sanctioning the poor and vulnerable and condemning them to a death by a thousand cuts, out of what seems pure sadism. But when such sadistic, inflammatory TV informs the zeitgeist, demonising those that Cameron abuses, people are going to be both on his side and sharing his merciless mindset.
Should Benefits Street be taken off? Well, we now live in an age where people not only believe the worst behaviour of the unemployed but would probably see Benefits Street's cancellation as censorship against the truth about these people's guilt. The horrid realisation that this kind of TV will now never go away. This is Varos, and there's no Doctor to break the signal.
So why then does this well-thought-out, topical story often provoke heavy criticism and even disownment from fans?
Philip Martin had written crime dramas like Gangsters, but his Doctor Who debut was perhaps at odds with the show and JNT's house style and barely meets it halfway. I think what bothers me most about 80's Who's worst scripts is how cold and neglected they feel. The sense that these scripts were never properly nurtured, for which blame goes to Eric Saward. Vengeance on Varos feels like it's missing a huge something amidst its excess of incident and shock.
There are criticisms of sexism in Martin's Doctor Who scripts, most blatantly in the unmade Mission to Magnus, and even the Doctor's quip about Peri's transformation nearly costing him a fortune in birdseed is pretty stomach-turning and misogynistic.
But maybe looking on Jeremy Kyle's guests or even My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding explains this. Martin was writing with an understanding of criminal culture and the growing underclass, and so he was an unfortunate cultural conduit for their backwards, patriarchal culture, where it's very much still 1950 and still all "Stand by your Man".
It feels like the Sixth Doctor and Peri are written as the Bouncer and his nagging groupie. I talked before about ideological closure and how Doctor Who encourages us to question that. It seems for many fans this story's ideological closure is unrefined if not outright indigestible. It depicts a violent, murderous Doctor despatching these creeps to horrid deaths without impunity and asserts that the Doctor wasn't wrong to.
This isn't unprecedented and wouldn't be so shocking had it come straight after Season 13. Unfortunately this is after Davison and only a year after Warriors of the Deep, which to me preached the really indigestible, insane ideological closure that only fandom's consensus of crazy could agree with. But it affected judgements of this story. Of course having been used to a pathetic Doctor that would still give his invading enemies the benefit of the doubt right till they killed the last man left, seeing the Doctor here decide to set up laser traps and poison vines to protect a man he's just met from a society he's only just arrived in does seem apocryphal. Enough to even overshadow the fact that the first place the Doctor landed was a torture chamber, which actually should instantly tell him enough about this inhuman regime to justify violently overthrowing it.
The problem is that this is not what the Doctor tells us motivated him. He tells us simply that he's picked Jondar's side against the guards out of sheer self-preservation. A trait that somehow Saward's input could make look inherently selfish, as could Colin's delivery, particularly regarding his accidentally killing the Raak in Mindwarp. He sounds callous and only self-interested, and, no matter how justified his actions probably were, it sounds like he couldn't even be bothered considering other means. In Varos, even the Governor sounds more remorseful than the Doctor. And that's a problem.
Nonetheless, with a bit of care and attention, Varos really could've been the masterpiece it should've. And if the show was in a healthy popular state, then with scripts like this, 80's Doctor Who could've stolen a march on The Hunger Games' success, 30 years ahead of time. The themes were strong, the message was right-minded and needed saying, and yet typically of the era our hero was still drawn as impossible to be in the same book as, let alone on the same page.
But it'll always have my respect. RTD Who, with a certain philistine cowardice, embraced the fact of Reality TV being supposedly the ubiquitous future and shamelessly exploited its ratings.
Vengeance on Varos took a stand against what was coming, but sadly too few people were watching at the time.