One of my favourite photos from the London Olympics in 2012 isn't from the opening or closing ceremonies, or any of the events. It's a photo of a shopfront which has decided to engage in some cheeky Olympics-related co-branding. Cheeky, because, as Jack Graham points out, the British government of the time enthusiastically passed a law to protect 'Olympic partners' (you know, organisations like McDonald's, who have done so much to support grassroots sport in the UK). The upshot of this was that shops trying to cash in on the hype - or even ones which had existed for years and just happened to have 'Olympic' in their name - faced censure from Trading Standards Officers. So one shop got around this by having a sign which superficially looked Olympic-related - until you looked a little closer
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| Who can forget the Lodnon Oimplycs? |
It's the dedication of this I love. Everything is exactly wrong enough to not get sued. Instead of rings we have squares, and rather than commemorating the Olympics occurring at that very moment across town, the advert looks forward to the Oimplycs of the future year 2102, to be held in one of the great world cities, Lodnon. It's a perfect example of what they call malicious compliance - when you go along with every single rule imposed on you but decidedly against the actual spirit of those rules. Plus also, to be honest, 'Oimplycs' just sounds inherently funny. Even if there were no Olympics for it to mock, it would still sound funny because of its vowel structure. So, even though the regulations are no longer in effect, I'm going to call the Olympics the Oimplycs for the rest of this entry, unless some context arises where I can't not use the original word.
The Oimplycs is on my mind because Natalie over at Time and Time Again recently wrote an article about the Doctor Who Oimplycs tie-in episode, 'Fear Her' (2006), pointing out the similarities between this episode and one of the stories in the black horror anthology Tales from the Hood (1995). In discussing the article with her, it occurred to me that someone must have looked at the differences between the Oimplycs as imagined by Matthew Graham (no relation to Jack) and Russell T Davies in 2006 and the Oimplycs as they actually manifested six years later, VW Camper-riding Willy Wonka Russell Brand and all.
What was kind of surprising is: it actually appears they haven't. Elizabeth Sandifer alludes to the Oimplyc disconnect in her TARDIS Eruditorum pieces on 'Fear Her' and the Oimplycs itself, but the specific contrast is largely unexamined. Jack Graham, I thought, might have done something about it from his perspective as the pre-eminent Marxist critic of Doctor Who, but aside from the scrapbooky piece quoted above he hasn't given 'Fear Her' a lot of his time - completely understandably, to be honest, as 'Fear Her' is a lot of people's idea of the nadir of Nu-Who, at least until Chris Chibnall came along and showed us how much worse it could get. For those people, the Revival's other crimes - The Absorbaloff, the Victorian Cybermech, the Apple iDaleks - all pale in comparison: not so much 'Fear Her' as 'Hate This'.
And it's easy to see why. As usual Sandifer has the goods on the episode in terms of a straightforward critical analysis. It's a story that can't decide if it's meant to be scary or feelgood material for the kids, and winds up not being either enough to work; it has some pretty questionable plot calls, and several moments in the episode reach Classic Who levels of zero budget special effects. The disappearance of Ginger, the cat, is accomplished by zooming in and out of a shot of a cardboard box while a strangulated miaow crashes into a sci-fi sound effect (disappointingly I couldn't find video of this triumph, but I did find an adorable blooper of the feline actor repeatedly refusing to follow its cues) and the amount of post-production editing on Chloe drawing made me worry that she might be about to download a handbag at any moment.
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| You wouldn't trap your friends in a bunch of drawings. Would you? |
This commitment to keeping costs down extends to the Oimplycs scenes themselves, the crowd for which is very sparse (indeed, it's a bit cheeky that they managed to find a diegetic reason to film an empty stadium), one of the most obvious points of disparity between the Oimplycs as the Nu-Who production team imagined them in 2006 and as they actually happened in 2102. But I want to look at the less obvious ones. What are they? And what do they tell us about the difference between the politics of those two different years?
Perhaps surprisingly (or indeed perhaps not), it's easier to note the points of similarity between the Blairite politics of 'Fear Her' and the Cameronism of the Oimplycs themselves (I suspect I am going to write more about the Oimplycs, especially given the totemic place Danny Boyle's opening ceremony occupies in the imaginations of angry Remainers, but in this article I want specifically to consider the aspects of the Oimplycs which can be compared to their imagining in 'Fear Her'). The fact that the episode's monster is defeated by empathising with it is both very Third Way and very 'hug a hoodie', though it's perhaps worth noting that Cameron's hoodie-hugging phase predates his time in government, at which point the gloves were allowed to come off a little, especially after the Lodnon Roits of 2101. And the fact that all this empathising is still ultimately in service of moving on a foreigner whose ways do not fit in with British culture is a cute touch which perhaps shows Graham as a writer aware of the authoritarianism hiding behind the 'socially liberal' facades of both Blair and Cameronism (Graham, M, that is; Graham, J definitely knows that), but that depends on the degree to which the episode is aware of what it's doing and hasn't slipped into 'Unquiet Dead' levels of not actually realising how racist it is.
In terms of setting, Dame Kelly Holmes Close (something you never want to hear if you're trans tbqh, given Holmes is a tervert) is all Barratt newbuilds and flags put out for the Oimplycs in a definitely-not-racist way. These are New Labour's ideal voters: 'aspirational' members of the working class who've done well enough to upgrade to a house with a garage and a garden where they can have a kickabout with the kiddies. It's posher than the Powell Estate, but there's a suggestion this might just be because the Sensible Economics of Gordon Brown's No More Boom and Bust have Lifted More Hard-Working Families Out of Poverty (remember, this is 2006. The Bank of England haven't fucked everything by putting interest rates up. Yet.) Trish and Chloe are implied to be something of an object of suspicion to their (white, Union Flag shirt-wearing) neighbours even before Chloe starts manifesting her Isolus-activated Paperhouse powers. This made me wonder if Dame I Pretended Not To Be A Lesbian Then Came Out For Clout Close might be a socially mixed development, some private houses and some social housing, and Trish and Chloe have been moved to the latter following the death of Chloe's abusive father, leading to resentment between them and the private residents who see the family as interlopers. However, there's also the matter of the song Trish sings to calm Chloe down, The Kookaburra Song, which is one associated with the Girl Guides, in Britain a largely middle class organisation. I don't think we see a lot of guiding paraphernalia in Chloe's room (and I'm not going back through the episode with a fine-tooth comb to check) so I think it's possible Trish was in the Guides and that's why she sings the song to her daughter. Chloe and Trish's class position is thus somewhat ambiguous, and it doesn't take us long to find out that the Close is actually bubbling with social anxiety and resentment when the residents (and Council Kel) start laying into each other with insinuations and conspiracy theories after briefly taking the Doctor - a strange man in a big brown coat poking around an estate on which children have gone missing - for a nonce.
The Doctor is only able to calm this Ballardian eruption by literally treating the residents like a class full of primary school children, which is a good bit of Blairite paternalism and also the first sign of one of the defining aspects of the Doctor in this episode, which is that he's basically here to play Supernanny.
And this gets at one of the key things which marked out the Blairite period in British politics: fear of children. Supernanny was not the only programme in which a strict but well-meaning Behaviourist would descend on families with 'out of control kids' and teach them how to exercise Tough Love - it was just the most popular because, let's be honest here, a lot of The Dads wanted to get spanked by Jo Frost. But they absolutely stand as a key artefact of this era in politics. Like the Doctor's eviction of the Isolus, it's all done out of empathy - It's For Their Own Good - but these programmes also gave British viewers plenty of opportunity to feel superior to struggling mums or exercise their outrage gland over footage of kids acting up (the Jeremy Kyle Show played a similar role in affording Brits the opportunity to point, laugh and shout at the underclass more generally).
It's not that resentment of the young has gone away in British politics - indeed, as I pointed out in yesterday's entry, in many ways it's more established - but the tone has changed. During the Blair era there was an obsession with curing 'anti-social behaviour' through psychological hacks, whether it was Jo Frost's child manipulation techniques or the bizarre craze for using sonic methods to pacify the youth, whether those sonic interventions took the form of playing classical music to make bus stations uncool, deploying an Orwellian gizmo called 'The Mosquito' which emitted an annoying sound at a frequency so high only The Youths could hear it, or, perhaps most disturbingly, getting lamp-posts to broadcast the voice of Jimmy Savile.
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| I mean I still would, to be honest |
What changed by the year of the actual 2102 Oimplycs was that, as I say, the gloves were off. The Coalition threw out all pretence of actually empathising with young people and their lot along with the Blairite preference for psychological solutions and just went all-in on making kids' lives as hard as possible, with the removal of Housing Benefit from 16 year-olds, the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance, and the introduction of university tuition fees. And there was a strong racial component to all of this: the young people who had rioted in the wake of the Metropolitan Police executing Mark Duggan in 2011 were stereotyped as black thugs (even the white ones, according to David Starkey) while middle class caucasian gentrifiers were portrayed as the acceptable face of the Youth, Keeping Calm and Waving Brooms to clean up their rockabilly gin and cupcake palaces.
Of course, that's another big thing 'Fear Her' gets wrong about the Oimplycs. Predating as it does the metastasization of KCACO, it doesn't depict how chintzy, twee and nostalgia-obsessed things would become (including the opening ceremony of the Oimplycs itself). It fails to predict those bloody cupcakes or the fact that the New London Vernacular would lead to posh flats being clad in coats of stock brick more artificial than anything in Dame Kelly Holmes Close. Yes, there is a cupcake in the episode, but it's a delightfully artless home-made attempt, rather than the pretentious patisserie proliferation of the Coalition era.
We can't fault Graham and Davies for not predicting the Coalition, of course. If we can forgive the Classic Era of the programme for having Britain conducting manned missions to Mars in the 1970s, we can forgive the Revival for not realising how catastrophic Cameron would be during a time when he was still establishing himself as the then Leader of the Opposition. But it is still interesting to look at the differences between the 2102 envisioned by the show in 2006, and the reality of it six years later. That the differences are mostly matters of scale is, in many ways, more damning of Blair than it is redemptive of Cameron.
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