THE DISRUPTORS

Ghost Light vs. A Christmas Carol

Unseasonably for a blog post published in the middle of August (on my birthday, as it happens), the next couple of stories reviewed are Ghost Light (a Seventh Doctor story, at last!) by Marc Platt, which was first broadcast in October 1989 (although it was the last story from the original run of Doctor Who to be made), and A Christmas Carol by Steven Moffat, which was first broadcast on 25 December 2010.

Ghost Light

I enjoy watching Ghost Light, although it’s a challenging one to understand. It’s a story, rather like Gabriel Chase, the ‘haunted’ house in which it is entirely set, that shifts and misdirects, giving the impression of being significantly larger on the inside, and populated by a large cast some of whom seem to have been lost within its dark corridors and many levels for a long time. I had a strong sense that most of the guest actors in this house of lost, confused souls had as little an idea of what was going on as their characters. Unlike older Doctor Who which could be understood at a basic level by just following the action – who is escaping/capturing/defeating who? – Ghost Light demands close attention to, and careful interpretation of, what is being said, which probably isn’t ideal for a weekly Saturday teatime serial but it makes for a far more interesting story to reflect upon. But it’s spooky, unnerving and seductive, enough to make up for the challenging plot.

So what is Ghost Light about? There are a number of themes, so I suppose different ones will stand out more for different people. The principal theme for me is change – how it comes about, and how different people respond to it.

There was a point in episode three (Ace: ‘It feels like this whole place is coming alive.’ Doctor: ‘Yes. It's the energy from Light's ship. Invigorating, isn't it?’) that reminded me of the effect of Mistfall, kickstarting a whole new evolutionary cycle in Full Circle (watched just a few weeks ago for the blog). I remembered how so much of Full Circle, and Warrior’s Gate, bookends to the Fourth Doctor’s E-Space trilogy in 1980, was concerned with being stuck in the mire – the Doctor and the people he met unable to progress, in physical or evolutionary senses – before life found a way, providing release like a cork from a bottle. There’s a similar dynamic in Ghost Light: the Doctor’s visit coincides with the emancipation of a small group of people from a state of apparent stagnation. All three stories end with the symbolic lift-off of a previously permanently grounded spaceship.

A few years ago, I worked on a book, Hidden Wings, by the spirituality writer Margaret Silf. The subtitle of the book is ‘Emerging from troubled times with new hope and deeper wisdom’, and Margaret writes at some length about the process of a caterpillar entering the chrysalis stage of its life, and undergoing devastating, chaotic change at a cellular level before emerging – transformed – as a butterfly (or, perhaps, as a moth, a creature which represents the evolutionary process in Ghost Light). This traumatic process is absolutely necessary for the creation of a beautiful new creature with wings that can fly. It’s a model of the journey experienced by a number of characters in Ghost Light as they break free from their own personal, hellish chrysalides: Control emerges from her dungeon cell to become a ‘ladylike’, Redvers shakes off his straightjacket and his servitude to Josiah Smith to act with sane and independent mind, Nimrod (the most ancient Earth human that the Doctor has ever encountered on screen?) abandons his duties to Light for to live for the Earth of the future, and Ace breaks the chains of guilt and fear that have haunted her past.

Light was portrayed as a winged angel but he could never fly like these three at the end of the story.

Indeed, Light is a creature incapable of personal transformation. He is concerned with an opposite of change: preservation. I wonder … Ghost Light’s writer, Marc Platt, was, I believe, familiar with the worlds of Doctor Who and other similar fandoms before penning this story, and it does seem to me that Light represents some perceived characteristics of the stereotypical fan: an obsession with listing and cataloguing, with making sure that every fact is pigeon-holed, colour-coded, ordered. Deviation from established, stone-set facts – like, I don’t know, the Doctor being half-human on their mother’s side, or having had countless life-cycles before William Hartnell’s iteration of the character – is not tolerated, and can lead to a destructive fury. Light suffering a personal system collapse when confronted with planetary-scale evolution seems familiar to me; it’s rather like browsing some of the darker corners of Doctor Who Twitter or Doctor Who Facebook. ‘File under Imagination comma lack of.’

I should admit that I empathise with Light to a small extent, or at least recognise in him a shadow of myself. I have the acquisitive fan gene. My focuses are the British comics of my childhood and all manner of Doctor Who books and figures and magazines and cards. Like Light, I tend towards being a ‘completist’ rather than a ‘collector’ because I’m more concerned with having the full set of something than the (probably more interesting and nobler) pursuit of rare or notable artefacts. I get a kick from arranging everything in order, compiling lists and cataloguing all the data about what I own, and I have no doubt that there’s some sort of psychological wounding that I try to heal through the process of surrounding myself with all these tokens of childhood.

But where, I hope, I differ from Light is that he regards himself a curator of the dead. He wants his specimens preserved, unmoving and unchanging. It’s really important to me that my collections live, have purpose, inspire creativity and imagination. That’s why I blog about and scan images from my comics, why I don’t worry too much about keeping things in plastic bags or airtight containers to protect their value – so they can be appreciated by other people, and help us all to think about the world in which we grew up, and the influence of those comics and TV programmes on who we are today. I want them to fly, like Redvers, Nimrod and Control.

An encounter with the Doctor is an encounter with the very essence of Change. The Doctor is Light’s kryptonite. For all the books and websites devoted to cataloguing the life and times of Doctor Who, they will never be complete, because something new is always being added to them, whether on the telly, in print, on audio, online, or in the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world. ‘You are endlessly agitating, unceasingly mischievous,’ Light curses the Doctor. ‘Will you never stop?’ No, they won’t.

The Seventh Doctor is a disruptor. An adventure with this incarnation of the Time Lord is rather like the hidden, mysterious process that occurs within a chrysalis as a caterpillar is transformed into a butterfly. He delights in stirring things up, in making change happen. In Ghost Light, the Doctor chances upon a nest of sleepy hornets and gives it a puckish poke with the tip of his question-mark umbrella. He is the catalyst, through chaos, for a liminal state at Gabriel Chase in which no-one is quite sure what is going on until a just and beautiful scenario emerges.

Sylvester McCoy brings a physical, anarchic energy to Doctor Who, projecting a powerful visual and verbal presence in every scene. Sophie Aldred as Ace has always seemed so well matched to her Doctor. As a pair they seem to find just the right rhythms together, in speech and dynamic action. I found myself surprised at how much the Doctor bodily yanks Ace around in Ghost Light; it ought to seem wrong for a middle-aged man to be so rough with a teenage girl, but because they are both such physical, boisterous actors and convey so convincingly a sense of mateyness, it kind of seems okay.

I’ve hardly mentioned what a significant story Ghost Light is for Ace, as the Doctor forces her to confront demons from her past and also to question her trust in him as he tricks her into revisiting the house that will reignite those traumas. The Doctor has chosen to exercise a pretty tough mentorship over Ace that we’ll see continued in the two remaining stories of season 26 … off-screen in many more books, audios and comics … and finally revisited televisually once more in 2022’s The Power of the Doctor reunion, in which the hologrammatic Seventh Doctor could be making direct reference to Ace’s Gabriel Chase rites of passage when he tells her: ‘I was only ever trying to teach you good habits, Ace,’ and ‘All children leave home, sooner or later. The joy is to watch them fly.’ Caterpillars, butterflies and moths.

Ace seems to be on another path of change at this stage of her life. While only implied rather than stated overtly on screen, I think perhaps there are signs in season 26 that she is becoming more confident in her bisexual self, an aspect of Ace that is later suggested in other media. A particular point is made of her ability to form close, fairly intimate bonds with other women in Battlefield and Survival, while also expressing herself sexually with the male soldiers in The Curse of Fenric. In Ghost Light a relationship is fast established between Ace and Gwendoline, and the fun that the two of them have cross-dressing adds to the suggestion of intentional queer subtext. Which is all worth mentioning because it was a courageous creative and political decision by the production team (including, presumably, Aldred, script editor Andrew Cartmel and producer John Nathan-Turner) for a prime-time TV drama in 1980s Britain.

A Christmas Carol

I’ve struggled to find too much to say about A Christmas Carol that isn’t just repeating what was shown on screen. Obviously, it’s a Doctor Who riff on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – a man is forced to revisit his past and consider his future before his heart melts and love conquers all. This was the first Christmas special to feature the Eleventh Doctor, and a return to the more fun, festive and less portentous tones of those specials that preceded 2009’s The End of Time. Matt Smith is in rocking form, tottering, swaying and jabbering away in great spirits, and it’s a clever, satisfying script from Steven Moffat. I haven’t had much reason to rewatch this one since it was first shown, and it felt slightly naughty to be doing so in mid-summer, but I really enjoyed it. This was a buoyant time for Doctor Who.

One way in which A Christmas Carol differs from Ghost Light is that the Eleventh Doctor is not a disruptor in the same style as the Seventh. He’s more reactive, arriving in Sardicktown on the planet of Ember not with a plan to cause trouble, but simply to request help to save Amy and Rory’s honeymooning spaceship. As things turn out, he does disrupt the system, breaking Kazran Sardick’s despotic governance of the town, and he saves the day by disrupting the fog crystals to break the cloud cover, so there’s my key link between the stories (there are more Connections below).

Michael Gambon is a top-drawer Christmas guest star, providing an excellent performance as the elderly Sardick. He brings humour, viciousness and vulnerability to the role of a man so scarred by the abuse of his father, and by the discovery of Abigail’s terminal illness, that he has cut himself off from meaningful relationship. Abigail accuses him of ‘hoarding my days, like an old miser’; he’s clinging on to his memories of youth, of happiness, keeping them sealed and preserved, away from the world, in Abigail’s suspended animation chamber. Here again, are parallels to those people I compared to Ghost Light’s Light – hoarders and cataloguers of the precious things of childhood.

Moffat’s script plays on the idea of Christmas – and other mid-winter celebrations – being a fairly universal celebration because it marks the idea of being ‘halfway out of the dark’. I’m not sure whether that’s an original thought of the author’s or an established theory, but it’s an interesting one. I don’t know how well it holds up these days, in Britain at least. It always seems as though there’s a lot more than half of the dark to go once Christmas is over! But there’s a sense in A Christmas Carol that Christmas is important from a community perspective. As Kazran Sardick says in his voiceover at the start of the show (mockingly, I know, but that’s only his cynical perspective): ‘On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact mid-point, everybody stops and turns and hugs, as if to say, well done. Well done, everyone.’ I think that’s a lovely vision of what Christmas ought to be – a time of mutual encouragement in a society that works together and looks after each other. Sadly, I don’t think we live in that sort of society any more, and consequently Christmas is a much more individualistic affair; shared celebrations generally don’t spread beyond the walls of the family home.

Which is very Scroogey/Sardicky of me, I know. Looking at it more positively, the vision of Christmas shared by the people of Sardicktown in A Christmas Carol is something to aspire to. Just not the cruel old man in his mansion lording it over and exploiting the good natures of the people. We’ve got enough of those already.

The episode includes a couple of traditional Christian carols – ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ and ‘Silent Night’ – which I found a little surprising for what is rightly considered to be a progressive, secular show. I think that both are beautiful hymns, evocative and nostalgic. The last verse of ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ (‘What can I give him? Poor as I am, If I were a shepherd, I would give a lamb. If I were a wise man, I would do my part. But what I can I give him? Give him my heart.’) takes me right back to childhood nativity plays in the village church where I grew up, and the solo sung by Mark, my best friend at the time.

I often think of those words, What can I give him, I who have nothing? I can give my heart. They’re powerful, sung to this tune as a plaintive solo. Beautiful, and yet … there’s something so tragic about this idea of someone so poor and innocent feeling this need to give something to the newly-born child-god. They feel so impelled to give that they commit their heart – essentially a life of devotion. Fealty. It’s awful. If God was real, if Jesus really was God, he wouldn’t need to be worshipped. And if he did want to be, well, that seems wrong to me. I like the Christian story as a narrative of freedom and personal empowerment. It can be read that way, but unfortunately the dominant reading is one of subjugation and suppression of the soul and of the people, and it’s been preached by the Church, and spun throughout its authorised liturgies, hymns and carols included, over many centuries.

A third song in A Christmas Carol, Abigail’s Song (or ‘When you’re Alone, Silence is all you Know’) was written by Murray Gold especially for the show, and for guest star Katherine Jenkins to sing. This song is key to the whole plot, as the Doctor uses it, sung by Abigail, to disperse the fogs that endanger the spaceship. It’s lovely, and ain’t that deep – basically saying that being with someone is better than being alone – but it does the trick. My only gripe against this song is that, alphabetically, it used to be top of my iTunes song list so it always started playing whenever I got in my car and plugged by phone into the stereo. It’s since been replaced by ‘A Change of Clothes’ from Heaven Sent, so now I’m sick of that one instead.

What a stocking full of gripes! Honestly, I did like this story, but it seems more interesting to write about the negative stuff … most of which isn’t really to do with A Christmas Carol itself, but what it made me think about. Full credit to everyone involved in making this otherwise excellent episode, which I will also remember for: the Doctor’s entry (‘Christmas Eve on a rooftop. Saw a chimney – my whole brain just went “What the hell?”!’), the flying shark, and the series of Christmas adventures shared by the Doctor, young Sardick and Abigail as the latter two gradually fell in love, which, big softy that I am, I found rather cute.

Connections

Both Ghost Light and A Christmas Carol are set (entirely in the former case, mostly in the latter case) is imposing gothic mansions, Gabriel Chase, Perivale, and Sardick Towers, Sardicktown.

Consequently the stories share a number of similar items of mansion décor: a large fireplace, butlers and servant staff, a big staircase and a grand piano (actually, in Sardick Towers it’s actually a weather control device designed in the style of an enormous theatre organ).

A guest star sings a song in both stories. Abigail’s Song in A Christmas Carol is mirrored by the rather less sublime Gwendoline’s song, That’s the Way to the Zoo (written in 1883 by J. F. Mitchell), in Ghost Light.

Both stories feature a character in police uniform. Neither of them do a lot of policing.

Ghost Light’s Inspector Mackenzie, ‘the cream of Scotland Yard’, exhibits GRT racism that may have been typical of Victorian days but sadly one wouldn’t be surprised to hear similar sentiments expressed today. ‘Ah, gypsy blood,’ he says of Nimrod. ‘I can see it in him. Lazy workers.’ As if to prove my point, Kazran’s father makes a similarly derogatory comment, two or three millennia into humanity’s future. ‘You’ll be singing to [the fish] next. Like gypsies,’ he scolds his young son.

Both Gabriel Chase and Sardick Towers witness the reliving of traumatic childhood memories. For Ace, the realisation slowly dawns that this is the house to which she fled at the age of 13, full of rage after ‘white kids’ firebombed her friend Manisha’s flat, but where she sense a greater evil leading her to burn the place down. Sardick recalls being beaten by his violent, authoritarian father. In his childhood bedroom he still keeps mementos of his youth (including ‘new’ memories that have appeared after the Doctor changes his timeline), while Gabriel Chase also has a nursery, full of mothballed toys (presumably Gwendoline’s).

What’s behind the round window? Someone preserved and someone imprisoned, but which is who?

Freed from his prison, an angelic creature called Light – perhaps manifesting as a form of light? – appear to the inhabitants of Gabriel Chase. In A Christmas Carol, holograms – visions formed of light – of Amy and other people imprisoned on the doomed spaceship appear in Sardick Towers. They all bring fear to the master of the house, just as the ghosts in Dickens’ original A Christmas Carol, and of course as the angel Gabriel struck fear in the hearts of the shepherds he visited in the Christmas Nativity.