Post by sparacus on Sept 11, 2012 16:40:14 GMT -5
By Jangly Giggins
UNSUBSTANTIATED ASSERTIONS 1: Aliens in the Orchid House
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is, by now, quite a lot of Ben Chatham. He’s been around for five years or so and for better or worse he is a genuine cultural phenomenon within Doctor Who fandom. Not, you know, a major phenomenon, but one I find pretty interesting and one I think warrants a bit of thought. So welcome to Unsubstantiated Assertions, which will hopefully be an occasional series looking at some of the broader thematic issues within the series. I was going to call it ‘I’ve Got a Degree from Cambridge’, but that just seemed obnoxious. This isn’t an attempt to replicate the late, lamented YOA’s excellent Fact of Fiction articles. I wasn’t here at the beginning, I don’t have his archive or his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Sparaverse. I see no point in doing another set of commentaries or reviews of the Chatham stories. Instead I want to broaden things out, look at the influences and themes. Where these stories come from, why they work and why they don’t. What they’re actually trying to do. Think of this as the About Time of Chathamology. Only, you know, not as good.
Chatham and the Orchid House
There is, of course, only one place we can start, and that’s interesting in itself. Blandische Hall, 1926. A stately home in the English countryside; a stately home with an Orchid House. Aliens in the Orchid House is notorious: we all know what it is. Spara’s debut epic, a long and exuberant mess of monster after monster, all set against a background of lurid, lovingly-described gay sex. As YOA called it, a ‘one-handed wonder’, and as Bernie Fishnotes put it (talking about the sequel, Return to the Orchid House, but essentially they’re the same story) ‘the equivalent of badly cut-and-pasting David Tennant and Freema Agyeman's heads onto some porn’. So why am I bothering to write a detailed analysis of it?
Because this is where it all began. We all treat Aliens in the Orchid House as proto-Chatham. When YOA opened his Fact of Fiction series with it, it felt like the natural thing to do. If we want to understand where Sparacus will take us with Ben Chatham, it seems obvious to us that we have to start here. The themes of this story will resonate again and again throughout Sparacus’ work; the project he began here is, we’ll see, unambiguously the same one he’s currently pursuing with The Blooding.
But let’s take a step back for a moment. Why does this feel so much like Chatham? If we actually think about it, the differences are quite large. Most notably Ben himself doesn’t appear. Sure, Alistair is ‘to only be played by ADAM RICKITT’ and has homosexual tendencies, but these aren’t enough in themselves to make him a proto-Ben. And he’s far from the main character here: in fact he’s fairly peripheral, perhaps coming in fourth after the Doctor, Rose and Daphne Blandische. It’s set nearly a century before the Operation: Delta era. What’s more, the whole plot, structure and setting are nothing like either the stories of Ben’s time on the TARDIS, nor anything from the ‘Ben Chatham Adventures’ proper. Never again will we get a story of this length, with the Doctor acting so strangely. Even with the homosexual-friendly and promiscuous tone of the Chatham stories, never again do we get such pervasive and explicit sexual content. We never again get such a cavalcade of successive villains in a single story. So why does this, so undeniably, feel like Chatham?
The answer to that should become apparent if we think about why this fails as a Doctor Who story.
Love and Monsters
Let’s get one thing clear: it isn’t the sex. It’s been said that there’s no story you can tell that isn’t potentially a Doctor Who story. That’s the whole point and joy of the format. It’s a show that can utterly change from one week to the next. Anywhere and everywhere is its mission statement. Sex is not excluded from that remit. The Curse of Fenric is about sex. Moffat’s most recent season arc entirely hinges on the repercussions of shagging in the TARDIS. The New and Missing Adventures are full of it. The sex itself isn’t the problem.
Nor is it, as Bernie Fishnotes suggested, that it’s incidental to the plot. I mean it is, in the end, but that’s only because the story went on too long and Spara forgot where it was going. Look again at the earlier chapters. Every time the monsters appear, it’s during sex. The bestial, animalistic nature of then monsters is used again and again to highlight and comment on the sexual activity:
Quote:
Meanwhile Rex & Daphne are enjoying a bit of outdoor sex in the woods.
Daphne: Oh yes, yes, faster..... Its so romantic here in the open air dear Rex. Ouch - mind out - a thorn's just stuck in my back.
Suddenly a dark ALIEN shape moved between the trees. Daphne let out a SCREAM........
Quote:
Meanwhile up at the Hall, Sir Reginald is admiring his collection of single malts while upstairs young Alistair (to only be played by ADAM RICKITT) is in bed with the chauffeur, Clive.
Alistair: Oh yes... YES - give it to me!
Suddenly theres a piercing scream from somewhere deep in the bowels of the old house:
Screamer: SCCCCCCCCCCRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMM MMMMMMMMMM!
Followed by the sound of an animalistic grunting and chains clanking!!!
Quote:
Meanwhile upstairs, as the moonlight shines on his manly chest, dark-haired Clive is making passionate love to Alistair (played by ADAM RICKITT)
Alistair: Oh yes - harder... harder... mmmmmmmmmmmm
Suddenly the door creaks open and a tentacle reaches in and gropes Clive's chest:
Clive: Hmmm thats it , stroke my chest with it
Alistair (SHOCKED) Its long and covered in scales
Clive: I wouldn't say that dear
Alistair: NO - look BEHIND YOU
Clive looks around to see a hideous tentacled MONSTER bearing down on them.........
Look at how the innuendo in explicitly conflates the sexual and the monstrous. There’s a clear blurring of the boundaries between sexual activity and the monstrous threat.
And it’s not just ordinary sex: every liaison in the story is transgressive in some way: masters and servants; British aristocrats and foreign nouveau-riche businessmen; outdoor sex in the woods; and of course, homosexuality in 1920s England. This transgressiveness is only emphasised by the graphic way it’s described. Yes, it’s crass, but it serves to break the narrative conventions of Doctor Who itself – and eventually the rules of what was acceptable content for Outpost Gallifrey’s fan fiction section. The fourth wall itself is in a sense broken. The effect is one of startling wrongness, of something being dangerously wrong. Of course the monsters show up during this sex: what greater symbol is there of the transgressive, dangerous and wrong than the monster? They’re inevitable, and where there are monsters, there’s the Doctor. Indeed, just look at how he arrives in the story:
Quote:
The Tardis lands in the woods near the grounds of Blandische Hall in 1926.
Rose: Doctor we've landed! EARTH!
The Doctor: No **** sherlock! OK lets go and have a poke about outside.
Rose: Oooo I thought you'd never ask.
They go outside.
Rose: Aw - its a wood and its all wet. Look at my leggins.
The Doctor: stop moaning you daft tart - the Tardis sensors indicate that theres a big house nearby - lets go
and cadge a bite to eat .
Meanwhile Rex & Daphne are enjoying a bit of outdoor sex in the woods.
Daphne: Oh yes, yes, faster..... Its so romantic here in the open air dear Rex. Ouch - mind out - a thorn's just stuck in my back.
Suddenly a dark ALIEN shape moved between the trees. Daphne let out a SCREAM........
- to be continued
Like the monsters, he turns up during an act of transgressive sex. In fact, just look at the ambiguity in that cliffhanger. It invites the reader to read it as referring to the Doctor. We’re being forced from the outset to question his role: is he just another monster?
So I’m going to take a stand here. The sex is not incidental to the plot of Aliens in the Orchid House: for the first half of the story, till it all gets away from Sparacus, everything is leading towards this being about the dangers of unbridled lust, about monsters as the embodiment of dangerous passion. It’s every inch the Doctor Who story. In fact, that most Who-ish of American shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer did an episode with almost that exact plot. No, to understand why Aliens in the Orchid House doesn’t work, we need to think a bit more about where it comes from.
Meet Miss Blandis(c)he
The first allusion which leaps to mind, given the title, is this:
No Orchids for Miss Blandish was, and is, a 1939 pulp hardboiled crime novel by James Hadley Chase. It was well-known enough at the time that George Orwell wrote an essay about it, and it made it to number 89 in Le Monde’s top hundred books of the 20th century, but I have to admit I haven’t read it. I haven’t seen the 1948 film either, so I can’t comment on whether the content influenced AitOH. From what I gather, it’s a British gangster story set in New York, and deals with the theme of Stockholm Syndrome, so it perhaps seems unlikely. On the other hand, it was notorious for its explicit sex and violence, with the film being condemned as ‘the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen’ (Monthly Film Bulletin). It also had Sid James in a minor role, so you never know. If nothing else, there’s a strong case to be made that at least the title seems to have made some impact on Sparacus. Perhaps the author's surname even inspired the eventual choice of Aliens' final villain. It makes as much sense as any other suggestion.
The Ghost of Sebastian Flyte
Despite the title, Aliens in the Orchid House owes a far greater creative debt to a different source: Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisted. Almost from the outset, there’s no doubt that we’re in Brideshead country (and incidentally, Brideshead Country is Wiltshire. This is going to be important when we get to Ben). If the mid-20s, high-society toffs in a country house weren’t a big enough clue, the connection becomes explicit (and yes, I do mean explicit) in the cast list and the opening scene. The very first non-TARDIS crew-member to appear is Rex Mortram, a ‘caddish American businessman’. Compare Brideshead’s Rex Mottram, an ambitious Canadian businessman. Even if we overlook this, the fact that both stories also feature a Cordelia (whose appearance in AitOH is, to put it mildly, somewhat bizarre) and a Nanny Hawkins. The strange spelling of ‘Blandische’ seems to be the result of blending the usual ‘Blandish’ with the surname of Brideshead’s overt homosexual student, Anthony Blanche.
The most important point of influence, though, is one of Brideshead Revisited’s principles, Sebastian Flyte. This name doesn’t occur in AitOH, but Sebastians will, of course, crop up again and again in Sparacus’ writings. Sparacus’ first blog was hosted at sebflyt.blogspot.com and this very story has been posted on other forums by someone claiming to be the author and with the username ‘Sebastian Flyte’. So what’s Brideshead Revisted’s Sebastian Flyte actually like? Well, since you ask, he’s an alcoholic, aristocratic aesthete studying at Oxford, of somewhat ambiguous sexuality (at least in the book: in both the recent film and the 1980s ITV series, which we know for a fact Sparacus has seen, he’s out-and-out gay). Sound familiar? What’s Ben Chatham’s middle name again? Now consider that the character of Sebastian Flyte is widely believed to have been based on a friend of Evelyn Waugh’s called Alastair. We don’t find out much about Aliens in the Orchid House’s Alistair, so we don’t know whether he’s a tormented Catholic student just down from Oxford. Even so, given all the other connections with Brideshead, it there can be little doubt that the coincide in names is not accidental.
This is why Alistair in Aliens in the Orchid House feels like a proto-Ben Chatham, then. It’s more than just the fact that they’re both ‘played by Adam Rickitt’. They’re both descendants and re-interpretations of the same literary character. If they’re Marty Stus, it stems from the fact that Sebastian Flyte is a character with whom Sparacus clearly identifies. The reason Aliens in the Orchid House feels so much like the Ben Chatham Adventures is because the fundamental problem that Sparacus wrestles with in both of them is the same: how do you write a science-fiction action adventure in which a character like Sebastian Flyte has a lot of sex?
As a concept this is fine. I mean, it’s not necessarily one I would choose, but there’s no reason it can’t work. It’s stating the obvious to point out that Doctor Who is always landing in other genres and playing out thinly-veiled or not-veiled-at-all literary classics. There’s no reason why the Doctor can’t land in a version of Brideshead Revisited where something’s gone badly wrong and where what should be bubbling Edwardian desires have somehow been unleashed in a torrent of dangerous desire. That’s very much a Doctor Who story. In fact, in 2005, it’s a very good idea for a Doctor Who story. To explain why, we need to look more clearly at the intellectual tradition this story comes from. Yes, that’s right. I just said Aliens in the Orchid House comes from an intellectual tradition.
The Chatham Aesthetic
I said before that Sebastian Flyte is an aesthete. What does that mean? Aestheticism was an intellectual philosophical and artistic movement which was popular among certain segments of the European élite at the end of the 19th century. It was a reaction against the positivist, scientistic assertion that knowledge had to come from testable, empirical experience. Aestheticism was more concerned with ideas, concepts, symbols and the subjective. We only need to know that Oscar Wilde was one of the most famous aesthetes to know that it was inextricably intertwined with decadence and transgression.
There are two key texts in late nineteenth-century aestheticism and both of them are important to Sparacus’s oeuvre. The first is Wilde’s own The Picture of Dorian Gray. We don’t need to go into specifics at this stage, but it’s no coincidence that one set of aliens in the Orchid House are called the Nairods. See what he did there? Wilde himself, of course, will crop up in The Case of the Twelve Gold Crosses. The second book is the one which is strongly implied to be the one which began Dorian Gray’s own corruption: J. K. Hysman’s 1884 novel À Rebours. Probably the most influential work in the development of aestheticism, its hero is a man called Des Esseintes, a secluded outcast of bourgeois upper-class society who devotes himself to the abnormal, relieving his constant ennui with continual obsessions including alcohol, sex, hothouse flowers and orchids. Remind you of anyone?
I said this was a phenomenon of the end of the 19th century. The renewed decadence of the 1920s drew on this tradition, as well as the influence of America’s ‘Jazz Age’ and Weimar Germany. Women redefined femininity with the rise of provocative, liberated ‘flapper’ culture; Art Deco provided an architectural and artistic revolution. All of this had at its root the Great War as a generation of young people lost its innocence and emerged from the conflict cynical and disillusioned, their confidence in the old world order shattered. The old certainties were gone and they abandoned themselves to a newly liberated, and more dangerous spirit. If this sounds familiar, it should. To put the Ninth Doctor into this environment should be amazing.
Doctor Who?
The problem is, Sparacus doesn’t know who the Ninth Doctor is. In 2005 Christopher Eccleston’s portrayal came as a bit of a shock to long-term Doctor Who fans. In retrospect, after five years of Tennant and Smith, this colloquial, leather-jacketed, apparently working-class and definitely northern Doctor seems less strange, but at the time it’s hard to overstate how different this looked compared to what had come before.
Now of course, we know the Doctor hadn’t fundamentally changed. He was still the same man he’d always been. The change was window-dressing; his personality and ethics remained the same. The trouble is, in 2005, when the New Series was just starting, we didn’t quite know whether this was the same character we’d always known. Sparacus certainly wasn’t sure. He’d recognised the change from the overtly Romantic, superficially Aesthetic, Eighth Doctor but failed to realise that it was just a change of appearances.
So Sparacus doesn’t write a war-broken lord playing dangerously at being a common man, he doesn’t contrast this with war-damaged young aristocrats and their lustful, decadent games. What he does is write the Doctor as what he initially seems to be: a working-class Northern fool. And when Spara’s writing, that effectively means he writes him as Barry Tuck.
So why does Aliens in the Orchid House fail? Because aesthetes don’t do anything. They contemplate and they muse and they drink (did I mention their preferred tipple was absinthe?). They have debauched, transgressive sex and they write poetry. They wallow in ennui and obsess about their orchids. If you want to write an action-adventure story about people like this, you need someone else who can take action. You need a leading man actually able to fulfil the role. You need the Doctor, not Barry Tuck. But Sparacus has failed to recognise who this new Doctor is and how he ought to fit into this story. So instead of advancing, the story degenerates into a repetitive holding-pattern of sex and monsters, booze and increasingly bizarre deferral of plot resolution. When it does stop, it doesn’t so much end as is arbitrarily halted. Even Sparacus realises this experiment has failed.
But he’ll be back. And he’ll have new ideas about how to tell action-adventures with Sebastian Flyte in them.
Janjy
UNSUBSTANTIATED ASSERTIONS 1: Aliens in the Orchid House
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is, by now, quite a lot of Ben Chatham. He’s been around for five years or so and for better or worse he is a genuine cultural phenomenon within Doctor Who fandom. Not, you know, a major phenomenon, but one I find pretty interesting and one I think warrants a bit of thought. So welcome to Unsubstantiated Assertions, which will hopefully be an occasional series looking at some of the broader thematic issues within the series. I was going to call it ‘I’ve Got a Degree from Cambridge’, but that just seemed obnoxious. This isn’t an attempt to replicate the late, lamented YOA’s excellent Fact of Fiction articles. I wasn’t here at the beginning, I don’t have his archive or his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Sparaverse. I see no point in doing another set of commentaries or reviews of the Chatham stories. Instead I want to broaden things out, look at the influences and themes. Where these stories come from, why they work and why they don’t. What they’re actually trying to do. Think of this as the About Time of Chathamology. Only, you know, not as good.
Chatham and the Orchid House
There is, of course, only one place we can start, and that’s interesting in itself. Blandische Hall, 1926. A stately home in the English countryside; a stately home with an Orchid House. Aliens in the Orchid House is notorious: we all know what it is. Spara’s debut epic, a long and exuberant mess of monster after monster, all set against a background of lurid, lovingly-described gay sex. As YOA called it, a ‘one-handed wonder’, and as Bernie Fishnotes put it (talking about the sequel, Return to the Orchid House, but essentially they’re the same story) ‘the equivalent of badly cut-and-pasting David Tennant and Freema Agyeman's heads onto some porn’. So why am I bothering to write a detailed analysis of it?
Because this is where it all began. We all treat Aliens in the Orchid House as proto-Chatham. When YOA opened his Fact of Fiction series with it, it felt like the natural thing to do. If we want to understand where Sparacus will take us with Ben Chatham, it seems obvious to us that we have to start here. The themes of this story will resonate again and again throughout Sparacus’ work; the project he began here is, we’ll see, unambiguously the same one he’s currently pursuing with The Blooding.
But let’s take a step back for a moment. Why does this feel so much like Chatham? If we actually think about it, the differences are quite large. Most notably Ben himself doesn’t appear. Sure, Alistair is ‘to only be played by ADAM RICKITT’ and has homosexual tendencies, but these aren’t enough in themselves to make him a proto-Ben. And he’s far from the main character here: in fact he’s fairly peripheral, perhaps coming in fourth after the Doctor, Rose and Daphne Blandische. It’s set nearly a century before the Operation: Delta era. What’s more, the whole plot, structure and setting are nothing like either the stories of Ben’s time on the TARDIS, nor anything from the ‘Ben Chatham Adventures’ proper. Never again will we get a story of this length, with the Doctor acting so strangely. Even with the homosexual-friendly and promiscuous tone of the Chatham stories, never again do we get such pervasive and explicit sexual content. We never again get such a cavalcade of successive villains in a single story. So why does this, so undeniably, feel like Chatham?
The answer to that should become apparent if we think about why this fails as a Doctor Who story.
Love and Monsters
Let’s get one thing clear: it isn’t the sex. It’s been said that there’s no story you can tell that isn’t potentially a Doctor Who story. That’s the whole point and joy of the format. It’s a show that can utterly change from one week to the next. Anywhere and everywhere is its mission statement. Sex is not excluded from that remit. The Curse of Fenric is about sex. Moffat’s most recent season arc entirely hinges on the repercussions of shagging in the TARDIS. The New and Missing Adventures are full of it. The sex itself isn’t the problem.
Nor is it, as Bernie Fishnotes suggested, that it’s incidental to the plot. I mean it is, in the end, but that’s only because the story went on too long and Spara forgot where it was going. Look again at the earlier chapters. Every time the monsters appear, it’s during sex. The bestial, animalistic nature of then monsters is used again and again to highlight and comment on the sexual activity:
Quote:
Meanwhile Rex & Daphne are enjoying a bit of outdoor sex in the woods.
Daphne: Oh yes, yes, faster..... Its so romantic here in the open air dear Rex. Ouch - mind out - a thorn's just stuck in my back.
Suddenly a dark ALIEN shape moved between the trees. Daphne let out a SCREAM........
Quote:
Meanwhile up at the Hall, Sir Reginald is admiring his collection of single malts while upstairs young Alistair (to only be played by ADAM RICKITT) is in bed with the chauffeur, Clive.
Alistair: Oh yes... YES - give it to me!
Suddenly theres a piercing scream from somewhere deep in the bowels of the old house:
Screamer: SCCCCCCCCCCRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMM MMMMMMMMMM!
Followed by the sound of an animalistic grunting and chains clanking!!!
Quote:
Meanwhile upstairs, as the moonlight shines on his manly chest, dark-haired Clive is making passionate love to Alistair (played by ADAM RICKITT)
Alistair: Oh yes - harder... harder... mmmmmmmmmmmm
Suddenly the door creaks open and a tentacle reaches in and gropes Clive's chest:
Clive: Hmmm thats it , stroke my chest with it
Alistair (SHOCKED) Its long and covered in scales
Clive: I wouldn't say that dear
Alistair: NO - look BEHIND YOU
Clive looks around to see a hideous tentacled MONSTER bearing down on them.........
Look at how the innuendo in explicitly conflates the sexual and the monstrous. There’s a clear blurring of the boundaries between sexual activity and the monstrous threat.
And it’s not just ordinary sex: every liaison in the story is transgressive in some way: masters and servants; British aristocrats and foreign nouveau-riche businessmen; outdoor sex in the woods; and of course, homosexuality in 1920s England. This transgressiveness is only emphasised by the graphic way it’s described. Yes, it’s crass, but it serves to break the narrative conventions of Doctor Who itself – and eventually the rules of what was acceptable content for Outpost Gallifrey’s fan fiction section. The fourth wall itself is in a sense broken. The effect is one of startling wrongness, of something being dangerously wrong. Of course the monsters show up during this sex: what greater symbol is there of the transgressive, dangerous and wrong than the monster? They’re inevitable, and where there are monsters, there’s the Doctor. Indeed, just look at how he arrives in the story:
Quote:
The Tardis lands in the woods near the grounds of Blandische Hall in 1926.
Rose: Doctor we've landed! EARTH!
The Doctor: No **** sherlock! OK lets go and have a poke about outside.
Rose: Oooo I thought you'd never ask.
They go outside.
Rose: Aw - its a wood and its all wet. Look at my leggins.
The Doctor: stop moaning you daft tart - the Tardis sensors indicate that theres a big house nearby - lets go
and cadge a bite to eat .
Meanwhile Rex & Daphne are enjoying a bit of outdoor sex in the woods.
Daphne: Oh yes, yes, faster..... Its so romantic here in the open air dear Rex. Ouch - mind out - a thorn's just stuck in my back.
Suddenly a dark ALIEN shape moved between the trees. Daphne let out a SCREAM........
- to be continued
Like the monsters, he turns up during an act of transgressive sex. In fact, just look at the ambiguity in that cliffhanger. It invites the reader to read it as referring to the Doctor. We’re being forced from the outset to question his role: is he just another monster?
So I’m going to take a stand here. The sex is not incidental to the plot of Aliens in the Orchid House: for the first half of the story, till it all gets away from Sparacus, everything is leading towards this being about the dangers of unbridled lust, about monsters as the embodiment of dangerous passion. It’s every inch the Doctor Who story. In fact, that most Who-ish of American shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer did an episode with almost that exact plot. No, to understand why Aliens in the Orchid House doesn’t work, we need to think a bit more about where it comes from.
Meet Miss Blandis(c)he
The first allusion which leaps to mind, given the title, is this:
No Orchids for Miss Blandish was, and is, a 1939 pulp hardboiled crime novel by James Hadley Chase. It was well-known enough at the time that George Orwell wrote an essay about it, and it made it to number 89 in Le Monde’s top hundred books of the 20th century, but I have to admit I haven’t read it. I haven’t seen the 1948 film either, so I can’t comment on whether the content influenced AitOH. From what I gather, it’s a British gangster story set in New York, and deals with the theme of Stockholm Syndrome, so it perhaps seems unlikely. On the other hand, it was notorious for its explicit sex and violence, with the film being condemned as ‘the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen’ (Monthly Film Bulletin). It also had Sid James in a minor role, so you never know. If nothing else, there’s a strong case to be made that at least the title seems to have made some impact on Sparacus. Perhaps the author's surname even inspired the eventual choice of Aliens' final villain. It makes as much sense as any other suggestion.
The Ghost of Sebastian Flyte
Despite the title, Aliens in the Orchid House owes a far greater creative debt to a different source: Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisted. Almost from the outset, there’s no doubt that we’re in Brideshead country (and incidentally, Brideshead Country is Wiltshire. This is going to be important when we get to Ben). If the mid-20s, high-society toffs in a country house weren’t a big enough clue, the connection becomes explicit (and yes, I do mean explicit) in the cast list and the opening scene. The very first non-TARDIS crew-member to appear is Rex Mortram, a ‘caddish American businessman’. Compare Brideshead’s Rex Mottram, an ambitious Canadian businessman. Even if we overlook this, the fact that both stories also feature a Cordelia (whose appearance in AitOH is, to put it mildly, somewhat bizarre) and a Nanny Hawkins. The strange spelling of ‘Blandische’ seems to be the result of blending the usual ‘Blandish’ with the surname of Brideshead’s overt homosexual student, Anthony Blanche.
The most important point of influence, though, is one of Brideshead Revisited’s principles, Sebastian Flyte. This name doesn’t occur in AitOH, but Sebastians will, of course, crop up again and again in Sparacus’ writings. Sparacus’ first blog was hosted at sebflyt.blogspot.com and this very story has been posted on other forums by someone claiming to be the author and with the username ‘Sebastian Flyte’. So what’s Brideshead Revisted’s Sebastian Flyte actually like? Well, since you ask, he’s an alcoholic, aristocratic aesthete studying at Oxford, of somewhat ambiguous sexuality (at least in the book: in both the recent film and the 1980s ITV series, which we know for a fact Sparacus has seen, he’s out-and-out gay). Sound familiar? What’s Ben Chatham’s middle name again? Now consider that the character of Sebastian Flyte is widely believed to have been based on a friend of Evelyn Waugh’s called Alastair. We don’t find out much about Aliens in the Orchid House’s Alistair, so we don’t know whether he’s a tormented Catholic student just down from Oxford. Even so, given all the other connections with Brideshead, it there can be little doubt that the coincide in names is not accidental.
This is why Alistair in Aliens in the Orchid House feels like a proto-Ben Chatham, then. It’s more than just the fact that they’re both ‘played by Adam Rickitt’. They’re both descendants and re-interpretations of the same literary character. If they’re Marty Stus, it stems from the fact that Sebastian Flyte is a character with whom Sparacus clearly identifies. The reason Aliens in the Orchid House feels so much like the Ben Chatham Adventures is because the fundamental problem that Sparacus wrestles with in both of them is the same: how do you write a science-fiction action adventure in which a character like Sebastian Flyte has a lot of sex?
As a concept this is fine. I mean, it’s not necessarily one I would choose, but there’s no reason it can’t work. It’s stating the obvious to point out that Doctor Who is always landing in other genres and playing out thinly-veiled or not-veiled-at-all literary classics. There’s no reason why the Doctor can’t land in a version of Brideshead Revisited where something’s gone badly wrong and where what should be bubbling Edwardian desires have somehow been unleashed in a torrent of dangerous desire. That’s very much a Doctor Who story. In fact, in 2005, it’s a very good idea for a Doctor Who story. To explain why, we need to look more clearly at the intellectual tradition this story comes from. Yes, that’s right. I just said Aliens in the Orchid House comes from an intellectual tradition.
The Chatham Aesthetic
I said before that Sebastian Flyte is an aesthete. What does that mean? Aestheticism was an intellectual philosophical and artistic movement which was popular among certain segments of the European élite at the end of the 19th century. It was a reaction against the positivist, scientistic assertion that knowledge had to come from testable, empirical experience. Aestheticism was more concerned with ideas, concepts, symbols and the subjective. We only need to know that Oscar Wilde was one of the most famous aesthetes to know that it was inextricably intertwined with decadence and transgression.
There are two key texts in late nineteenth-century aestheticism and both of them are important to Sparacus’s oeuvre. The first is Wilde’s own The Picture of Dorian Gray. We don’t need to go into specifics at this stage, but it’s no coincidence that one set of aliens in the Orchid House are called the Nairods. See what he did there? Wilde himself, of course, will crop up in The Case of the Twelve Gold Crosses. The second book is the one which is strongly implied to be the one which began Dorian Gray’s own corruption: J. K. Hysman’s 1884 novel À Rebours. Probably the most influential work in the development of aestheticism, its hero is a man called Des Esseintes, a secluded outcast of bourgeois upper-class society who devotes himself to the abnormal, relieving his constant ennui with continual obsessions including alcohol, sex, hothouse flowers and orchids. Remind you of anyone?
I said this was a phenomenon of the end of the 19th century. The renewed decadence of the 1920s drew on this tradition, as well as the influence of America’s ‘Jazz Age’ and Weimar Germany. Women redefined femininity with the rise of provocative, liberated ‘flapper’ culture; Art Deco provided an architectural and artistic revolution. All of this had at its root the Great War as a generation of young people lost its innocence and emerged from the conflict cynical and disillusioned, their confidence in the old world order shattered. The old certainties were gone and they abandoned themselves to a newly liberated, and more dangerous spirit. If this sounds familiar, it should. To put the Ninth Doctor into this environment should be amazing.
Doctor Who?
The problem is, Sparacus doesn’t know who the Ninth Doctor is. In 2005 Christopher Eccleston’s portrayal came as a bit of a shock to long-term Doctor Who fans. In retrospect, after five years of Tennant and Smith, this colloquial, leather-jacketed, apparently working-class and definitely northern Doctor seems less strange, but at the time it’s hard to overstate how different this looked compared to what had come before.
Now of course, we know the Doctor hadn’t fundamentally changed. He was still the same man he’d always been. The change was window-dressing; his personality and ethics remained the same. The trouble is, in 2005, when the New Series was just starting, we didn’t quite know whether this was the same character we’d always known. Sparacus certainly wasn’t sure. He’d recognised the change from the overtly Romantic, superficially Aesthetic, Eighth Doctor but failed to realise that it was just a change of appearances.
So Sparacus doesn’t write a war-broken lord playing dangerously at being a common man, he doesn’t contrast this with war-damaged young aristocrats and their lustful, decadent games. What he does is write the Doctor as what he initially seems to be: a working-class Northern fool. And when Spara’s writing, that effectively means he writes him as Barry Tuck.
So why does Aliens in the Orchid House fail? Because aesthetes don’t do anything. They contemplate and they muse and they drink (did I mention their preferred tipple was absinthe?). They have debauched, transgressive sex and they write poetry. They wallow in ennui and obsess about their orchids. If you want to write an action-adventure story about people like this, you need someone else who can take action. You need a leading man actually able to fulfil the role. You need the Doctor, not Barry Tuck. But Sparacus has failed to recognise who this new Doctor is and how he ought to fit into this story. So instead of advancing, the story degenerates into a repetitive holding-pattern of sex and monsters, booze and increasingly bizarre deferral of plot resolution. When it does stop, it doesn’t so much end as is arbitrarily halted. Even Sparacus realises this experiment has failed.
But he’ll be back. And he’ll have new ideas about how to tell action-adventures with Sebastian Flyte in them.
Janjy
