My Batman Birthday, the Doctor's Downfall, and Nostalgia

It's September 1989. A cold night. I know it is because I remember having to wear a jacket when I went out to play in the street with friends after watching an episode of Doctor Who. The Who serial this month is 'Battlefield', a story which mixes nuclear paranoia, Arthurian legend and the show's own peculiar brand of science fantasy and includes the revelation that at some point in his incredibly long life the Doctor is Merlin. I am still seeing the final cliffhanger frame of tonight's episode, the face of a terrifying alien/demon/BBC effects department triumph called The Destroyer in my head as I notice our street sign has been damaged, probably by a car, and absentmindedly kick it. 

I mean seriously, look at this dude

In my head I am recreating a frame from Frank Miller and David Mazuchelli's Batman: Year One, which I recently received as a birthday present due to my absolute obsession with Tim Burton's Batman adaptation of that year, but in the eyes of the elderly woman passing by I have clearly engaged in the wanton act of vandalism which has destroyed our respectable street sign, and I am harangued for my alleged crime until I decide I have had enough of her shit and go back inside. Maybe I should reread the new 2000AD so I can try and work out what the Hell is going on in Strontium Dog.: Simon Harrison's art looks cool but I have no idea what's going on. Or maybe I'll have a look through the HeroQuest quest book in anticipation of having the gang over tomorrow to run one of the scenarios. 

Twenty-eight years old, I was. 

Not really, obviously. I had in fact only just turned old enough to have seen the Burton Batman, the first film released in the UK under the new '12' certificate, and had in fact not yet been 12 when I'd seen the film that summer. It might seem a little quaint that there was concern that the events transpiring in Anton Furst's incredible Gotham City sets might be too frightening for young children, now that we're raising the first generation to have been exposed to those genuinely disturbing Elsa and Spider-Man YouTube vids, but you have to remember that Britain has always had a sizable contingent of people who worry about what's in children's media. These days those people endlessly moan online about things getting too 'woke' but in the nineties (and we are, here, in 1989, on the very cusp of the Long 90s - the Berlin Wall hasn't fallen yet, but it's teetering) they were convinced that a combination of latchkey parenting and Video Nasties was going to raise a generation of thugs. I know, right? I mean I don't know about you but I've hardly garrotted anyone, and I was definitely too young the first time I saw Robocop and Predator. Perhaps it was one of these video-addled superthugs the woman who freaked out at my display of Ninja martial arts thought she was confronting. 

Doctor Who itself had been mortally wounded by the human incarnation of this busybody tendency, Mary Whitehouse, before I had even been born, when the producer for what many consider the show's golden age, Philip Hinchcliffe, was sacked to appease the 'silent majority' (in fact, as those of us who've had to deal with terverts know only too well, a depressingly vocal minority) she supposedly represented after Whitehouse decided the nation's children had taken what would these days be called irreversible damage from seeing the Doctor apparently drowned at the end of the third instalment of the 1976 serial 'The Deadly Assassin'. Really, the Elizabeth Sandifer article linked here under the first mention of Whitehouse's name will tell you everything you need to know about that, but right now all you need to know is that 'Battlefield' came at the end of over a decade of Who stories being watched like a hawk for anything that would annoy the Whitehouse Brigade under subsequent producers. This baleful gaze was continuing to falter as culture grew decidedly more liberal (you'll have observed that all of Whitehouse's wrath couldn't stop my parents from letting me see Jesse Ventura call his mercenary chums 'a bunch of slack-jawed faggots' and advocate for the ability of chewing tobacco to turn men into charismatic megafauna) but it was a factor in the cancellation of the show, which would happen later that year. 

Mary Whitehouse thought kids were too stupid to realise Tom Baker is an actor and could hold his breath.

But why am I writing all this? Well, I've been thinking a lot about nostalgia lately, and engaging in a fair bit of it too - including a rewatch of the Hinchcliffe/Baker era. Nostalgia has a lot to do with grief - the earliest use of the word occurs in describing Swiss mercenaries pining for their home cantons during the many European wars of the 18th century. So it isn't surprising that in the wake of my mother's death I've turned backward in my viewing and reading of late, rewatching things (like the Jimmy McGovern/Paul Abbott-written ITV crime series Cracker, for example) that I haven't seen in years, looking at them almost for the first time and seeing how they hold up now. And, as part of my effort to just write more lately, it's reasonable to assume that - when I am not causing mischief in the Tory leadership election - I will be writing about some of these series, some of these books, some of these cultural artefacts I've been looking back at. And that will probably be here rather than on my Medium page because - as you will probably have worked out - I try to keep my Medium page for something close to the level of a published article and usually draft posts in Google Docs beforehand, whereas here I feel happier to take a more freeform approach of just starting somewhere and seeing where it takes me. 

It's July 2022. A hot day: record temperatures in parts of the country, which have already seen RAF Brize Norton suspend all flights because their runway's melted. Today I have had to tidy up my bathroom in preparation for a visit from my letting agents' maintenance man - a job I have been putting off, in my depression, for months but have been forced to do because the plug for my bathroom sink has unexpectedly jammed itself backwards halfway down the pipe and is refusing to emerge leaving me with, effectively, a bricked sink. Which I managed, largely because it was early enough when I started for the heat to be only oppressive rather than infernal, but it definitely left me deciding that it was the last physical thing I was doing today. Maintenance haven't turned up, so I guess I'm stuck waiting until they do. And while I wait I may as well watch 'The Robots of Death'. Though I do notice Jacob Geller has a new video about Zelda games up, so I might watch that first.  All of us, it seems, are taking a look at our pasts lately.