Just finished reading The Life and Scandalous Times of JN-T, a controversial biography of John Nathan-Turner, the late Doctor Who producer who oversaw its various rises and falls during the 1980s. A few thoughts.
On the whole, it’s very good. Particularly in terms of capturing
JN-T’s personality, his world and his sense of humour. Ironically it’s of most
interest to Doctor Who fans when covering JN-T’s early career, as that’s new
information whereas the Doctor Who section of his career has been thoroughly explored in interviews, articles and DVD documentaries, and there are few stories to be
found which won’t be familiar to fans. In fact, the coverage of the awfulness
of fandom during the mid-80s brought back a lot of bad memories I’d suppressed.
The author seems to have taken ‘even-handedness’ as a
mission statement and the book tries to give all points of few, even to a
fault. On more than one occasion does the narrative grind to a halt as a dozen
or more of JN-T’s acquaintances get to have their say on some point of
contention; on the one hand, I applaud the thoroughness and appreciate the
author’s desire not to leave anything out, but on the other hand I think some
tighter editorial discretion would have helped, to realise that once a point’s
been effectively made it’s time to move on. It is a biographer’s job to sift the evidence
and to boil it down; at various points in this book it seemed the reader is
expected to decide whether or not something was the case based on sheer weight
of numbers, as interviewees line up on either side of whether, say, JN-T’s
boyfriend was a good or bad influence.
Similarly, there are several occasions where one interviewee
will make a contentious statement about JN-T, about his sex life or his
attitude to work, which is then followed by three or four better-informed
interviewees saying that it wasn’t true for various easily-verifiable reasons.
Again, in such instances a biographer should, I think, just have left the story
out, as it’s a biographer having his cake and eating it; here’s a juicy bit of
gossip which will surprise you, oh but I should add it’s almost certainly not
true. So while the book is thorough, and even-handed, it lacks rigour. It gives
too much emphasis to interviewees who have repeatedly shown themselves to be
unreliable and biased in other areas.
The other point that concerns me, regarding rigour, is that
sometimes it seems as if the stories about things that didn’t go very well during JN-T’s times
have been selected and presented to show JN-T in a negative light; for instance,
during the 80s there was an unfortunate contretemps between the Doctor Who
production office and writer Christopher Priest. Priest has given two
interviews on this over the years, once in 1990 (about 6 years after the event)
and once in 2009 (25 years after the event). In the first interview, he states
the problem was created by the script-editor Eric Saward, even going so far as
to quote correspondence. In the later interview, he states it was solely JN-T he had
the problem with. And yet this biography chooses to only present the latter
version of events, selectively quoting to make it look like the dispute was between
JN-T and Priest and was solely of JN-T’s making (and then notes that Eric Saward had to apologise for... er... what exactly?). So it seems that in this case,
given two conflicting versions of events, the author has chosen to present only
the one which showed JN-T in an unfavourable light and not the one which showed
him as a victim of circumstances drawn into a dispute by his script-editor; I
can’t help but wonder how many of the other stories have been selectively
edited in this way.
I would also echo the criticism of the book made by Matthew Sweet in his review, that the writing style is occasionally distractingly, inappropriately
glib; sex is 'fucking', apparently producer Philip Hinchcliffe ‘pissed off management’ while the
Savile crisis is designated a ‘shit-storm’. It reads occasionally like a
post on a Doctor Who forum; biographer Marson is incapable of
mentioning any Doctor Who story without giving his verdict on how good or bad
he personally regards it, almost like a nervous tic, which doesn’t create an
impression of objectivity (even though I agree with most of his assessments).
I sighed as I read the Graham Williams era being
described as containing ‘undergraduate humour’; alas the book is littered with 80s fanzine clichés I thought we’d dispensed with decades ago. Marson can't resist sharing gossip about any deceased member of the production
team, whether warranted or not, as though Peter Moffatt’s domestic arrangements
might be of interest to anyone or shed any light on his work directing The Two Doctors.
He also can’t resist dropping nod-and-wink hints about the behaviour of those
who are still with us. We’re very much back in that DWB mindset with this book,
and that’s probably the most depressing thing about it of all.
You see, in the mid-80s DWB was a Doctor Who fanzine that
most of us bought because it was the only magazine that actually had up-to-date
news, and at the time DWM was a pretty shoddy piece of work, padded out with
regurgitated non-features (many written by Marson himself). DWB was a
window into Doctor Who fandom of the time, which was, basically, poisonous,
with a clique of older, well-off fans publicly savaging the show, its cast and
its producer seemingly as a personal vendetta. Well, thanks to this book we do
know it was personal. This book brought it all back; those fans’ ludicrously
inflated sense of importance and entitlement, the egos (even now, they can’t resist building up their parts from insignificant bystander
to crucial eye-witness). When one fan dismisses the show’s producer as merely a
‘caretaker’ that pretty much says it all; these half-dozen or so fans thought
they owned the show, they thought they spoke for the rest of us, and they
poisoned the whole atmosphere of fandom. It’s one of the reasons why I gave up on it
all back in the 90s, it was just all too insular, bitchy and depressing.
And as this biography relates, they were astonishingly,
excruciatingly sycophantic towards JN-T when they wanted something from him
(i.e. visits to studio recordings) just as they were equally vitriolic when
excluded. I’m not sure the story of 80s fandom is as significant in JN-T’s career
as this book portrays it, but it is a fascinating subject, because it’s the
story of a producer being seduced by fame, sexual opportunism and (American)
fans treating him like a movie star, and becoming too close to certain fans as a
result. It was a mistake, but given that no-one had found themselves in that
situation before, perhaps a forgiveable one.
Yes, he shagged a few fans who were up for it. I suppose I
must be pretty broad minded because I didn’t find it remotely shocking.
Certainly not as shocking as Marson believes it to be, given that he twists
himself in knots at the end of the chapter he has entitled with typical inanity
‘Hanky Panky’ to try to excuse what, to be honest, is behaviour that doesn’t really
need excusing. Marson even brings up the notion of JN-T being a paedophile to
dismiss it, as though any reader would naturally suspect that of any homosexual man
who worked at the BBC. Such are these paranoid Daily Mail days that we live in.
The book takes as its two villains Gary Downie, JN-T’s partner, and
Jonathan Powell. The ‘revelations’ about Gary Downie are rather sordid – I remember
encountering him at a convention once and finding him pretty creepy – but won’t
be news to anyone who read that horrendous car-crash of an interview with him
that DWM published a few years ago in a rare lapse of judgement. Painting
Powell as a villain, on the other hand, seems unjustified and wrong. Powell’s
forthright manner doesn’t do him any favours on the printed page and like
anyone in television he’s not short of people willing to slag him off but,
well, the guy did know what he was talking about.
A bit of background. For the Trial of a Time Lord season
Powell actually, for the first and only time, took an interest in Doctor Who
and how to improve it. He read the scripts and gave detailed notes. And if
you read the notes he gave, you’ll realise he was bang on the money and for
someone who claimed not to like Doctor Who, he could still see how it worked
and how to fix it. He spotted every weakness in Robert Holmes/Eric Sawards’
scripts and offered sensible, effective solutions. The fact that it was, by
this point, very nearly too late is just the nature of television. If Holmes
and Saward had actually implemented his notes then Trial would have been a
better show, a much better show. But they didn’t, because it would’ve required
too much effort. But how does Marson present this in the biography? The
internal post ‘spewed up’ a memo from Powell of ‘closely-typed script
assassination’. That’s just wrong, the fanboy knee-jerk response that Robert-Holmes-can-do-no-wrong-vs-a-meddling-executive-who-doesn’t-understand-the-show,
and we’re back in DWB land again.
However, where the book is much stronger is on its portrayal
of the BBC and its culture at the time; it seems to have been a drinking club
that occasionally made programmes. The fact that some of those involved think that
good stuff got made because, rather than in spite, of the boozing just shows
how accepted it was in those days. It’s one of the untold stories that so many
of the UK’s industrial problems in the late 70s were due to the
drinking culture in the political and managerial classes; received wisdom has
it that the unions caused all the problems but at least their members turned up
for work sober in the afternoons.
And it’s telling, and quite sad, that JN-T was one of the
last products of this alcohol-fuelled television culture, and that within ten
years behaviour which had once been the norm was now a liability. And the other
tragedy of JN-T’s career is that he devoted so much of it to understanding how
to get the best out of the BBC’s internal production system, just as the BBC
were about to dismantle it, so all his knowhow would turn out to be useless. And so JN-T found himself redundant, with
nothing to do but drink himself to death, and this book is a (literally) sobering
warning about the dangers of alcoholism and how quick and easy
it is to kill yourself with booze if you put your mind to it. You’re left with
a sense of loss, not so much at JN-T’s death but with the sense that even if
even he were still alive, he’d have nothing to do except appear as a talking head in Ed Stradling's
documentaries.
The above review might come across as negative, but I
nevertheless recommend this book because there is so much in it that is
extraordinary. Russell T Davies’ contributions are typically insightful and forthright, as are the interviews with the show's various actors and writers. The research on JN-T’s career before and after Doctor Who is
unprecedented, and Marson writes movingly and intelligently about his own
personal experience of grief. But, well, I just wish it had been more objective,
more rigorous, more tightly-edited, and less of a nudge-nudge wink-wink DWB-filtered journey into Doctor Who Babylon. But maybe that’s what JN-T would’ve wanted.
Oh, and surely I can’t be the only one to guess the identity
of the mysterious fan and source of fabricated Doctor Who gossip who drove a wedge between
JN-T and Eric Saward? With initials ‘AR’ (who Eric, being dyslexic, would think
of as ‘AW’)?
