Every Living Thing

YOU, are Becoming GODS. 

There's a new Master of Creation, 

and it's YOU! 

You’ve unraveled DNA --

and at the same time you're cultivating bacteria strong enough to 

Kill Every Living Thing! 

 

D’you think you are ready for that much Power? 

You lot? You lot? 

Y’Cheeky bastards!

“Iain Spence published Sekhmet Hypothesis: The Signals of the Beginning of a New Identity as a book in 1995, but it wasn’t until two years later that I came across his ideas in an article he’d written for the magazine Towards 2012. As an illuminating way of reconsidering the familiar, I’m particularly fond of the Sekhmet Hypothesis, which never fails to get people talking at parties. 

As usual, please remember that this is just a framework; a way of ordering information into meaningful patterns in the service of creative lateral thinking, if you like. 

Nineteen eighty-eight saw ecstasy, or MDMA, as the favoured drug, accompanying long-form trance, ambient and dance music, Manchester “baggy” fitness wear as street wear, grunge beards, and a return to long hair. 

In comic books, this was the time of Deadline, Doom Patrol, Shade, and Sandman.”

“I'm a bit upset with the art now that John Ridgway's not doing much and Tim Perkins is taking over. I like working with John but he's just too busy now to devote much of his time to Dr Who. I don't know if I'll do any more Dr Whos, but I quite enjoyed it. 

I really liked Colin Baker's Doctor, but he was never given a decent storyline. The potential was wasted. 

I'm nervously waiting for the reaction of the readers to my new comic story, because there's a lot of stuff about continuity and I'm afraid I screwed it up. 

I based the story [The World Shapers] on a text piece I remembered from an old annual - I think it was 1966 - which I thought was set on the planet Marinus. 

Recently I discovered the annual at a comic mart, and when I re-read the text story it wasn't set on Marinus at all and it wasn't anything like I'd remembered. 

So, I've messed with the continuity and I've also brought back Jamie as an old man, which will probably bring in some flak from the die-hards. 

Thing is, if you're going to do it, you might as well make the effort to try something different. 

I think if I'd written for the T.V. series and brought back an old Jamie, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece; because it's the comic, they'll probably say 'You're messing with sacred stuff!'

There was a Dr Who story they wouldn't let me do last year. 

I came up with this idea where the Doctor meets two future versions of himself, a sort of 'Three Doctors' thing. 

I thought, 'I won't do two Doctors from the past, I'll do two from the future', to make it a bit different. 

One of them was a woman and they wouldn't let me do that at all. They said the readership wouldn't accept it. There was some big controversy."

GM,

After-Image,

January 1988

“He turned to the computer and touched one of its graphics display keys. Instantly, Peri was replaced by another tortured figure. The Doctor recognised Dastari. It was a perfect holographic forgery, he thought.

He touched the key again and another figure appeared that he didn’t recognise. A rather scruffy person in an ill-fitting tailcoat and black string necktie.

The Doctor switched off the machine and sank back into the control chair with his mind racing. Although he would instantly recognise The Brigadier or Leela or any of his past companions, he scarcely had any recollection of how he himself had appeared in past forms. 

Nonetheless, he thought, it was all Lombard Street to a China orange that the chap in the tailcoat was himself. In that case, not only had his sartorial taste improved, but at last it was all beginning to make sense."

— Robert Holmes,

The Two Doctors

“From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, making a Doctor Who record appears to be an obvious populist choice. It is, after all, one of the most successful and best-loved series on British TV. 

This was not the case in 1988, when ‘Doctorin’ The TARDIS’ was released. 

At that time, Doctor Who was largely considered an embarrassment, by both the BBC and the viewing public at home. 

If Drummond and Cauty had been drawn to it for populist reasons, their timing was out.”

“If we take Alan Moore’s model of IdeaSpace seriously – if only for a moment – and look at the idea of Doctor Who, we see an extremely detailed fiction. 

The Doctor is one of the great line of British folk heroes; a character in the tradition of Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. Whereas American folk heroes tend towards cowboys or gangsters who take what they want from the world and end up either rich or winners, British equivalents are very different. 

They are anti-Establishment figures, even when they work with the Establishment, and they save the day not for personal gain, but because it is the right thing to do. 

For generations of British school kids, Doctor Who was the myth they grew up with. 

They had only the most superficial knowledge of the likes of Zeus, Odin or Jesus, but they knew all there was to know about Davros, The Master and Cybermen. 

The Doctor is the first British folk hero of the TV age, and the nature of his TV origins make him unusual. There is no definitive creator standing behind him, no Arthur Conan Doyle, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ian Fleming or J. K. Rowling. Instead, he popped out from the space between many minds. 

There was a succession of different actors, writers and producers who all invigorated the character for a short while before moving on or burning out. 

The character is defined by his ability to regenerate and change his personality. He can change all his friends and companions. He can go anywhere, at any time. He is, essentially, the perfect, never-ending story. He will survive long after you, me or anyone currently involved in making the series has died. 

He adapts, grows, mutates and endures. In this he fulfils much of the standard definitions for A Living Thing. 

This is not bad going, for A Fiction. 

Already, there are untold thousands of Doctor Who stories, which, for a character of fiction, is almost unheard of. There have been hundreds of stories on TV, and many, many more available as novels, audio CDs, comic books, films, stage plays, webcasts, fanfics and radio programmes. 

The growth of the story, compared to any other fiction from the same period, is deeply unusual. Indeed, it has become arguably the most expansive and complex non-religious fiction ever created. 

According to Moore’s model of IdeaSpace, this fiction may be complicated enough to act like A Living Thing. 

Note that this is not to say that Doctor Who is A Living Thing, for that would sound crazy. 

It is to say that it behaves as if it were A Living Thing, which is a much more reasonable observation. 

Of course, if you were to then go on to try to define the difference between Something That is Living and Something That Behaves Like it is Living, you would be a brave soul indeed. 

The programme’s expansion through all possible media was begun by its first script editor, David Whitaker. 

Although Doctor Who has no definitive ‘creator’, Whitaker can be said to be the man who nurtured the heart of the series, sculpting the peculiar mix of humour, morality and wide-eyed imagination that makes the series so unique. 

He was involved in the creation of most of the iconography of the show, from introducing the Daleks, to making the TARDIS in some way alive and the Doctor able to regenerate into a different actor. 

He also spread the life of the character beyond television, for he wrote the first novels and annuals and co-wrote the Peter Cushing Dr Who movies from the 1960s. Whitaker’s work on Doctor Who was particularly influenced by alchemy, a subject that he claimed to be ‘very fond of’. 

The basic alchemical principle, that a physical object can be affected by the manipulation of a symbol of that object – the idea of it, if you prefer – is used explicitly in his 1967 story The Evil of the Daleks (which is also a strong contender for the story that invented steampunk.) The Evil of the Daleks is about a pair of Victorian scientists who accidentally build a time machine out of 144 mirrors (the number ‘144’, or 122, being alchemically significant). 

This basic alchemical principle is still used in the programme today, for example in Steven Moffat’s claim about his monsters the Weeping Angels: ‘The image of an Angel is an Angel.’ 

In Whitaker’s Doctor Who, when the TARDIS broke down because of a problem with the ‘mercury in the fluid links’, there was specific alchemical symbolism in the choice of mercury. 

When the first Doctor, William Hartnell, was replaced by the second, Patrick Troughton, Whitaker gave him a flute and an obsession with hats in order to echo the classical god Mercury (Hermes to the Greeks). 

All this would have meant little to the children watching in the 1960s. Nevertheless, Whitaker seems to have been consciously shaping the character of the Doctor into a mercurial, Trickster figure. 

When the current Doctor Who writers claim that they only became writers because of Doctor Who, they usually credit the series of novels which Whitaker started and which young boys devoured during the 1970s. 

There is another explanation, however, which comes from the very format of the programme. 

In the original series, episodes built towards a climax and ended on a cliff-hanger in which the Doctor or his friends appeared to be in inescapable danger. 

Of course, the children watching knew that the Doctor would somehow survive. He always did. The Question, then, was not ‘Would he escape?’, but ‘How?’

What could possibly happen to get the Doctor out of that situation? 

There would be much debate about this in school playgrounds after each episode. 

And as the kids thought about the problem, their imaginations were being stoked. 

They were thinking like writers. 

Indeed, they were trying to write the next episode themselves. 

What we have here, then, is a character of fiction, neither created nor ‘owned’ by any one imagination, who is actively creating the very environment – writers’ minds – that it needs to survive into the future. 

Not only is Doctor Who a fictitious character who acts like a living thing by constantly evolving and surviving, it is also a self-sustaining living thing that creates the one thing that it needs to survive. 

From an evolutionary point of view, that’s impressive. 

There is no requirement for those affected by an idea to be aware of any of this. 

When the media critic Philip Sandifer writes that ‘David Whitaker, at once the most important figure in Doctor Who’s development and the least understood, created a show that is genuinely magical and this influence cannot be erased from within the show’, he does not mean that any of the hundreds of actors and writers who went on to work on the programme saw it in those terms. 

Or, as Sandifer so clearly puts it, ‘I don’t actually believe that the writers of Doctor Who were consciously designing a sentient metafiction to continually disrupt the social order through a systematic process of détournement. 

Except maybe David Whitaker.’ 

From Drummond and Cauty’s perspective, the story of Doctor Who is irrelevant. All that was happening was that they were exploring their mental landscape, and they were fulfilling their duty as artists by doing so more deeply than normal people. 

This is a landscape with many unseen, unknown areas where who knows what might be found. The KLF explored further than most and, if we were to accept Moore’s model, it would perhaps not be surprising that a fiction as complex as Doctor Who could encounter them in Ideaspace and, being at its lowest point and in dire need of help, use them for its own ends. 

For Moore, and other artists such as the film-maker David Lynch who use similar models, The Role of The Artist is like that of A Fisherman. It is his job to fish in the collective unconscious and use all his skill to best present his catch to an audience. 

Drummond and Cauty, on the other hand, appear to have been caught by the fish. Lacking any clear sense of what they were doing, they dived in as deeply as Moore and Lynch. They did not have a specific purpose for doing so. They just needed to make something happen – anything really, such is the path of chaos. 

‘It was supposed to be a proper dance record, but we couldn’t fit the four-four beat to it, so we ended up with the glitter beat, which was never really our intention but we had to go with it,’ Cauty has said. ‘It was like an out-of-control lorry, you know, you’re just trying to steer it, and that track took itself over, really, and did what it wanted to do. 

We were just watching.’ 

This lack of intention is significant, from a magical point of view. 

One of the most important aspects of magical practice is The Will. 

Aleister Crowley defined magic as being changes in The World brought about by the exercise of The Will, hence his maxim ‘Do what thou Will shall be the whole of the Law’. 

The will or intention of a magical act is important because the magician opens himself up to all sorts of strange powers and influences and he must avoid being controlled by them. 

Drummond and Cauty were not exerting any control on the process, and so they made themselves vulnerable to the who knows whats that live out of sight in the depths of IdeaSpace. 

For this reason, you could understand why Moore would think that Bill Drummond was ‘totally mad’. 

All this only applies if you’re prepared to accept the notion of Magic. 

Nevertheless, it is worth noting because there is another fiction that is important in Drummond and Cauty’s story. This one is more significant, because this is the fiction that they became, taking on its title and performing their actions in its name. It is also the source of our whirlwind of synchronicities. 

We are talking, of course, about The Justified Ancients of Mummu. The question then becomes: did Cauty and Drummond choose The JAMs, or did The JAMs choose Cauty and Drummond? A possible clue will come later, when we look at what the founding purpose of The Justified Ancients of Mummu actually was.”