There have been several accounts of the development of
the study of popular culture: for example, Jim McGuigan’s Cultural Populism.
However, I have decided to avoid replicating such an historiography of the
discipline. I seek to contend that in order to convey the importance of the
study of popular culture, it is necessary to produce an analysis of a popular
text. As Roland Barthes wrote, ‘Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new
object that belongs to no one’ (1). The chosen text is a Doctor Who serial, The
Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), written by Robert Holmes. The reason for this
choice is admirably articulated by McGuigan:
‘the term popular culture retains its value when one is
talking about the people who make it popular - that is, when one is talking
about the people who keep a particular cultural form going by being the public
for it or by being its producers’ (2).
The Talons of Weng-Chiang has a bearing on many
aspects of Popular Culture: anthropology, moral panics, gender roles, the
authenticity debate, subcultures, consumption, and oral culture. David Pringle,
in his guide to science fiction literature, has accused Doctor Who of being
responsible for the ‘juvenalization’ of British SF (3). The value of Popular
Culture, and why it has occupied such a pivotal place in Cultural Studies, will
be shown by my attempt at rebuking Pringle’s simplistic condemnation of
Doctor Who.
2
However, it would seem to be difficult to depart
from the notion that Doctor Who is juvenile, as proved by the recent
cover of John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins’ book, Science Fiction Audiences:
Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. Both programmes are represented via
children’s dolls. In an extensive apologia about the cover, Tulloch and Jenkins
write: ‘Since this book challenges these stereotypes, we hoped to avoid
reproducing them on the book’s cover’ (4). Their explanation, however, fails to
convince. In a battle between the authors and the designers, the designers won,
a victory of marketing over content. Doctor Who fans do not like to be
represented as a subculture: hence their loathing for the Resistance is Useless
documentary about Doctor Who, which conveyed them as vacuous people dressed in
modish anoraks (5). As Tulloch’s book would seem to show, there is no typical
Doctor Who fan. Indeed, GaytimeTV on BBC2 recently profiled the Sisterhood of
Karn, a gay Doctor Who fan club which likes the programme for its ‘camp’
qualities.
Robert Holmes' The Talons of Weng-Chiang is a particularly popular
serial amongst Doctor Who fans. It was voted as the best Tom Baker story in the
twenty fifth anniversary Doctor Who Bulletin poll (6). As Atkinson-Broadbelt
writes:
‘many people suggest that the golden era of Doctor Who
was the first three seasons featuring Tom Baker as the Doctor’ (7).
That era had begun with Philip Hinchcliffe becoming the
3
producer in 1975. Simultaneously, the most prolific
writer of Doctor Who, Robert Holmes became the script editor. This is what
Hinchcliffe says about his plans for the programme:
‘I felt the show had become a bit too childish... I
wanted to try and win over more adults to the audience as well as keep the
children’ (8).
One way in which Hinchcliffe succeeded in doing this was
via the character of Leela. In his audience groups, Tulloch discovered that
Leela was the only female Doctor Who companion who appealed to young girls. She
was the only one that they would emulate whilst playing.
‘Yet Leela’s very brief huntress leathers, cleavage
and... wet, see-through Victorian underwear were there to capture the adult
male’ (9).
Hinchcliffe wanted to avoid the traditional Doctor Who
trait of having a strong female companion for the Doctor who would nevertheless
end up asking the Doctor what was going on throughout each and every episode.
What he and Robert Holmes decided to do was to represent Leela as an ‘Eliza
Doolittle’ character, with the Doctor as her Professor Higgins.
The Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide lists more than
ten influences for The Talons of Weng-Chiang: so many, that one has to consider
the authenticity of the text. As Rosalind Coward writes, ‘the existence of the
author is being made a condition of television being taken seriously as a
cultural product’ (10). It would seem then that a serious effort is being
made to claim The Talons of Weng-Chiang as High Art, for the script
4
has now been published by Titan, along with a few other
Doctor Who scripts. The strength of Doctor Who’s ‘golden era’ was mainly due to
Robert Holmes, who wrote more scripts for the programme than anyone else. Yet,
there is more than just a hint throughout The Talons of Weng-Chiang that Holmes
does not take authorship seriously. Indeed, the fact that Holmes chose to write
this story, in which the Doctor impersonates a certain famous fictional
detective, may have been entirely due to a coincidence of surnames. Robert
Holmes even steals jokes from other writers, such as when the Doctor tells
Litefoot that Leela was found floating down the Amazon in a hatbox. Litefoot
can only react as Lady Bracknell does in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being
Earnest (11). Intertextuality has always played a large role in Doctor Who.
Even from the very beginning, the programme stole from other authors, H.G.Wells
being the obvious example. One must surely ask what effect all this
‘inauthenticity’ must have on the audience. The answer is quite surprising:
‘the programme seeks to establish a "complicit"
relationship with its audience, which is much closer to theatrical vaudeville
than to those of dramatic ‘realism”’ (1.2).
This strategy is aimed at pleasing a tertiary educated
audience. It might also help to explain why M/A/R/R/S had such a massive hit
with Pump Up the Volume: M/A/R/R/S’ potential audience was already quite adept
at dealing with intertextuality, to the point of finding it a source of’
5
pleasure (13).
As James Clifford writes, ‘Ethnography is moving
into areas long occupied by sociology, the novel, or avant-garde cultural
critique’ (14). It is also present in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, as a kind of’
‘reverse’ anthropology. Leela actually originates from humanity’s future, so
the Doctor asks ‘Surely you’d like to see how your ancestors enjoyed
themselves?’ Here, it is the savage who is engaged in a study of the tribe of
Cockneys. Leela is curious to see Litefoot lighting a pipe and in the theatre
she asks, ‘Do we need to give the responses?’ However, Leela is still
constituted as the Savage, ‘who could ask questions as part of the
"civilizing" process’ (15). She is not just joining in with the
customs of’ late nineteenth century London, she is being forced to participate
in them. Towards the end, Litefoot takes on the role of Shaw’s Professor
Higgins in Pygmalion, when he attempts to teach Leela the ladylike manner of
drinking a cup of tea. However, this is frustrated when Leela’s questions
reveal just how ridiculous the whole ceremony is.
Travel plays an important part in the Doctor’s
adventures. His time machine, the Tardis, can land anywhere, any time. As John
Urry writes, ‘travel was expected to play a key role in the cognitive and
perceptual education of the English upper class’ (16). This is part of the
Doctor’s intention of landing in nineteenth century London, with Leela playing
the
6
role of his ward, if a only little bit more roughly than
Lucy Honeychurch in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Tom Baker’s Doctor often
spent a great deal of’ time trying to go on holiday:
‘To be a tourist is one of the characteristics of the
‘"modern” experience. Not to “go away” is like not possessing a car or a
nice house’ (17).
Professor Litefoot has also done some travelling abroad,
having lived in China for many years when he was young, his father having been
in the punitive expedition of 1860. Unfortunately for him, his only relic
from that time is a Chinese puzzle box:
‘Not the least significant element in the middle class
rejection of the indigenous carnival tradition in the late nineteenth century
in Europe was a compensatory plundering of ethnographic material - masks,
rituals, symbols - from colonized cultures’ (18).
Henry Gordon Jago is middle class proprietor of the
Palace Theatre, at a time when the bourgeoisie, instead of trying to suppress
carnival totally, began to take it over as an entrepreneurial activity. As
Walton writes:
‘By the 1890s... . class attitudes to recreation were
becoming less divergent, with the beginnings of’ a decline in the early
Victorian cult of outward ‘respectability”’ (19).
According to Stallybrass and White, this bourgeois
embracing of theatre may have been inevitable, for ‘disgust always bears the
imprint of desire’ (20). Hence Jago and Litefoot willingly welcome the Doctor’s
help, even although, as an extra-terrestrial, he is definitely one of the
‘Other’.
7
It is worthwhile at this point to compare Robert
Holmes' The Talons of Weng-Chiang with a work of fiction written at the end of
the 1890s: Dracula. Bram Stoker’s Gothic novel shares many of the concerns of
The Talons of Weng-Chiang. According to Stephen D. Arata,
‘For Stoker, the Gothic and the travel narrative
problematize... . . the very boundaries on which British hegemony depended:
between civilized and primitive, colonizer and colonized, victimizer (either
imperialist or vampire) and victim’ (21).
Dracula acts in ‘bad faith’, since his study of the West
allows him to inhabit London without being noticed, despite the fact that he is
an Easterner. This usurps tradition, for, as Arata points out, fictional
narratives previously had made much of Westerners being able to pass as
Easterners (but never vice versa) (22). Dracula was written at a time when
there were many doubts about the continuation of the British Empire. It was a
time for introspection and guilt. Arata writes that, ‘As fantasies, these
narratives provide an opportunity to atone for imperial sins, since reverse
colonization is often represented as deserved punishment’ (23). In The Talons
of Weng-Chiang, the presence of’ the Chinese in London could be another
articulation of this fear. However, the fear of the 1890s was never that
Britain would just be overwhelmed by the weight of superior forces. The fear
was related to Darwinian theory, ‘for if humans could evolve, it was thought
that they could also devolve or degenerate, both as nations and individuals’
(24). This explains why there was such an
8
anxiety about ‘Outcast London’:
‘For just as Rome had often been at the mercy of’ its
mob, so London, impregnable from without, might become vulnerable to an even
more potent and volatile threat from within’ (25).
In 1888, there was a larger and more famous moral panic
than that concerning the ‘residuum’.
‘It says in the paper how it could be Jolly Jack
at work again’, Casey tells Jago in an early scene of The Talons of
Weng-Chiang, referring to the fact that a number of women have disappeared in
the vicinity of the theatre. ‘Moral Panic’ was a term first devised by Stanley
Cohen to interpret the responses to the mods and the rockers. However, as
McGuigan notes, there were moral panics in earlier periods, such as that
against the ‘hooligans’ in the 1890s (26). A hooligan was a stereotypical youth
who carried a knife, defined as ‘Other’ by the Irishness of the name given to
their subculture. Casey is the only Irishman in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, and
not surprisingly, he is portrayed as being subservient to Jago. Arata notes how
much fear was directed against the Irish in this period (27).
There was also a moral panic directed against
Doctor Who in the mid-seventies - ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang. . . came in for
special abuse for its racism, violence, and sexuality’ (28). McRobbie writes
that moral panics have always been an instrument of the right, a way for the
right to get popular support for its concerns. Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien
9
relate that
‘Mary Whitehouse and others also helped to politicise
sexual representation, arguing that certain types of imagery were responsible
for causing actual violence or abuse’ (29).
This is not a new tendency. There was a famous production
of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde during the autumn of 1888. So
convincing was Richard Mansfield’s performance on the London stage that he was
actually accused of being the Ripper and the production was forced to close
(30). No doubt a modern audience, if they were to travel back in time and watch
that performance, would find it very tame. The same could be said of The Talons
of Weng-Chiang today, where the main monster is a very pathetic looking giant
rat.
One of the most recent moral panics was that which
followed the murder of James Bulger in 1993 (31). In that case, the media was
once again blamed for being a bad influence. The two suspects were said to have
watched a film called Child’s Play. In this series of films, the monster is a
doll that goes around murdering people. One can see immediately how Doctor Who
got into trouble, for Mr. Sin is a very similar character (although he never
makes a pretense to be ‘cute’). After The Talons of Weng-Chiang, ‘dolls which
turned into monstrous aliens.., were henceforth consciously avoided’ (32). One
could also say that the accusation of racism is very pertinent.
Mercer and Julien give an example of the typical
Oriental
10
stereotype: ‘The Oriental has no capacity for violence: he
is mute, passive, charming, inscrutable’ (33). Thus one could say that The
Talons of Weng-Chiang presents the very opposite of this stereotype, with all
its karate. Edward Said has written extensively on Orientalism. Clifford
and Marcus report his views thus: ‘The Orient functions as a theater, a stage
on which a performance is repeated, to be seen from a privileged standpoint’
(34). Li H’sen Chang performs this role in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Indeed,
on stage, he is the stereotypical Chinaman, especially in the way he speaks.
Yet Chang never looks as though he is exploited here - he is always in control.
Chang deliberately racialises himself as part of his act: ‘One of us is yellow’
he says as the Doctor walks out of the cabinet of death. Litefoot, who should
have a privileged standpoint, says, ‘I never got anywhere near to understanding
‘em - and I was brought up in China.' Despite being presented as the villain
for most of the story, we are ‘left with nothing but pity for the dying
Chinaman’ (35).
Besides, if the characters in The Talons of
Weng-Chiang are conveyed as being racist, it is no doubt because they lived in
a racist era. During 1888, one of the most popular theories concerning the
murders was the ‘Jacob the Ripper’ one (36). Feelings escalated so highly that
there was nearly a pogrom, and Jews were widely intimidated in the East
End. However, there was also the ‘Mad Doctor’ theory, based on the fact
that the
11
Ripper must have had some anatomical knowledge. If
Professor Litefoot and the Doctor had wandered into Whitechapel at that time,
then they would have been in severe danger. George Bernard Shaw suggested that
a ‘scientific sociologist’(37) could have been the Ripper, sharing Litefoot’s
views about Whitechapel: ‘A place of appalling vice and squalor! Overdue for
clearance in my opinion’. Robert Holmes is subtle in his suggestion of a
darker side to Litefoot's character.
‘I imagined him to be an ugly hunchback with boils
all over his face’ (38) is an apt description of Magnus Greel - except
that this is what Carl Sutcliffe said on being told that his brother was
the Yorkshire Ripper. As Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer argue, the
Victorian Gothic villain still informs the way we think of sex murderers (39).
However, it would seem that the Gothic itself has changed. After all, in
nineteenth century Gothic, the last people you would want on your side would be
an alien and a savage tribal woman, according to Arata and Spencer. Tulloch
offers a possible explanation: ‘The relationship between British SF and
imperial decline has been noted by various writers' (40). Britain’s world role
in 1977 was minuscule compared with that of the 1890s. In 1977, it was
impossible to portray a coherent representation of British imperialism. Indeed,
the main villain in The Talons of Weng-Chiang turns out to be a twisted Western
imperialist, Magnus Greel, who callously exploits his Chinese followers. The
Doctor, who, like Dracula, has studied Western culture so that he can
12
‘pass’ as a Westerner, is not seen as a threat, for
Britain needs all the help she can get when she can no longer act unilaterally
(hence our ‘close relationship’ with America today).
It has to be said that without the discourses of
popular culture, the above reading of The Talons of Weng-Chiang would not have
been possible. One of the aims of this essay has been to prove that such a
complex cultural text could not possibly be called ‘juvenile’ after close
analysis. Whether Doctor Who belongs to high or low culture, its importance as
a cultural form cannot be denied. Few television series last more than a year,
let alone twenty six (1963-1989). Indeed, in the many years after it
ended, Doctor Who still has a loyal following. Popular culture has created a
vocabulary and many techniques to explain such phenomena, which are
particularly useful for the academic fan, such as John Tulloch. To end on a
flippant note, one only has to repeat Tom Baker’s words as the Doctor in The
Talons of Weng-Chiang: ‘Made in Birmingham. . . Yes, that’s the main
requirement’. Cultural Studies was made in Birmingham too.
13 Footnotes
(1) Clifford, James and Marcus, George E. , Writing
Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, (London, 1986) p. 1.
(2) McGuigan, Jim, Cultural Populism (London, 1992)
p.83.
(3) Pringle, David, The Ultimate Guide to Science
Fiction, (Cambridge, 1995) p. 102.
(4) Tulloch, John and Jenkins, Henry, Science Fiction Audiences: Watching
Doctor Who and Star Trek, (London, 1995) p. v i i.
(5) Golder, Dave, ‘Whose Who?’, SFX, (no.1, June
1995) p.37.
(6) Linford, Peter, Doctor Who Bulletin, (no.68, August
1989) p.8.
(7) Atkinson-Broadbelt, Austen, ‘Producing Who: Philip
Hinchcliffe’, Doctor Who Monthly (no.210, March 1994) p.8.
(8) Tulloch, John and Alvarado, Manuel, Doctor Who: The
Unfolding Text, (London, 1983) p.58.
(9) Tulloch, John, The Unfolding Text p.213.
(10) Coward, Rosalind, ‘Dennis Potter and the question of
the television author’, Critical Quarterly, (vol.29, no.4), p.87.
(11) Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest (London, 1993) p.19.
(1.2) Tulloch, John and Alvarado, Manuel, ‘Send-up:
authorship and organization’, Popular Fiction, (London, 1990) p.297.
(13) Goodwin, Andrew, ‘Sample and Hold’, On Record,
(London, 1990) p.258.
(1.4) Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, p.23.
(15) Tulloch, John, The Unfolding Text, p.213.
14
(16) Urry, John, The Tourist Gaze, (London, 1990) p.4.
(17) Urry, John, The Tourist Gaze, p.4.
(18) Stallybrass, P. and White, A. , The Politics and
Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986) p. 172.
(19) Walton, John, ‘Residential amenity, respectable
morality and the rise of the entertainment industry: the case of Blackpool,
1860-1914’, Popular Culture Past and Present (London, 1989) p. 133.
(20) Stallybrass and White, Transgression, p.191.
(21) Arata, Stephen D. , ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula
and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, (Summer 1990)
p.626.
(22) Arata, Stephen D. ,‘The Occidental Tourist’, p.638-9.
(23) Arata, Stephen D. ,‘The Occidental Tourist’, p.623.
(24) Spencer, Kathleen L. , ‘Purity and Danger: Dracula,
the Urban Gothic, and the late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis’, ELH (no.59, 1992)
p.204.
(25) Jones, Gareth Stedman, Outcast London (London, 1984)
p. 14-15.
(26) McGuigan, Cultural Populism, p.90.
(27) Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist’, p.633.
(28) Tulloch, The Unfolding Text p.1.58.
(29) Mercer, Kobena and Julien, Isaac, ‘Race, Sexual Politics
and Black Masculinity: A Dossier’, Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity (London,
1988) p. 133.
(30) Walkowitz, Judith R., City of Dreadful
Delight, (London, 1994) p. 207.
15
(31) McRobbie, Angela, Postmodernism and Popular
Culture, (London, 1994) p.199.
(32) Tulloch, Popular Fiction p.301.
(33) Mercer and Julien, ‘Black Masculinity’, p.108.
(34) Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, p.12.
(35) McElroy, John, Doctor Who The Scripts: The
Talons of Weng-Chiang, (London, 1989) p.9.
(36) Walkowitz,City of Dreadful Delight, p. 203.
(37) Cameron, Deborah and Frazer, Elizabeth, The Lust to
Kill, (Oxford, 1987) p. 125.
(38) Cameron and Frazer, The Lust to Kill, p.35.
(39) Cameron and Frazer, The Lust to Kill, p.37.
(40) Tulloch, The Unfolding Text, p50.
16
Bibliography
Programmes
The Talons of Weng-Chiang, Written by Robert Holmes,
Directed by David Maloney, Produced by Philip Hinchcliffe London, 1977.
Literature
Forster, E.M., A Room with a View, London, 1988.
Stoker, Bram, Dracula, London, 1992.
Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest
of Earnest, London, 1993.
ARTICLES
Arata, Stephen D., ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and
the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies Summer 1990.
Coward, Rosalind, ‘Dennis Potter and the question of the
television author’, Critical Quarterly vol.29, no.4.
Spencer, Kathleen L., ‘Purity and Danger: Dracula the
Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis’, ELH 59 (1992).
Books
Bennett, Tony (Ed.), Popular Fiction London, 1990.
Cameron, Deborah and Frazer, Elizabeth, The Lust to Kill,
Oxford, 1987.
Chapman, Rowena and Rutherford, Jonathan (Ed.s), Male
Order: Unwrapping Masculinity, London, 1988.
17
Clifford, James and Marcus, George E. (Ed.s), Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography, London, 1986.
Cornell, Paul et al., The Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide, London, 1995.
Goodwin, Andrew and Frith, Simon (Ed.s), On Record: Rock,
Pop and the Written Word, London, 1990.
Jones, Gareth Stedman, Outcast London, London, 1984.
McElroy, John (Ed.), Doctor Who The Scripts London, 1989.
McGuigan, Jim, Cultural Populism London, 1992.
McRobbie, Angela, Postmodernism and Popular Culture,
London, 1994.
Stallybrass, P. and White, A., The Politics and Poetics
of Transgression, London, 1986.
Tulloch, John and Alvarado, Manuel, Doctor Who: The
Unfolding Text, London, 1984.
Tulloch, John, and Jenkins, Henry, Science Fiction
Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek, London, 1995.
Urry, John, The Tourist Gaze, London, 1990.
Waites, B. (Ed.), Popular Culture Past and Present,
London, 1989.
Walkowitz, Judith R., City of Dreadful Delight, London,
1994.
FANZINES
Doctor Who Bulletin no.68, August 1989.
Doctor Who Monthly no.210, March 1994.
SFX, no.1, June 1995.
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