Doctor Who, Popular Culture and Politics: An Annotated Interview with Paul Magrs

by Alan McKee

Paul Magrs is a consumer and a producer of cult media. He has written many novels, which can be broadly divided into two groups. His working-class magic-realist 'literary' novels - including Marked for Life (1995), Could it be Magic (1997), and All the Rage (2001) - have been extremely highly regarded, and reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. His Doctor Who novels - The Scarlet Empress (1998), The Blue Angel (1999), Verdigris (2000) and Mad Dogs and Englishmen (2001) have not been reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. They are, however, highly regarded by many Doctor Who fans; and despised by many others. These novels - born of a love for British popular culture in general, and Doctor Who in particular - have rewritten the adventures of the BBC's time-travelling hero as a series of self-referential fictions; as a conspiracy faked by an arm of the British government; and as the dreams of a mentally-challenged man living in a working-class council estate. They have featured dragons, robotic sheep, and nasty parodies of the crew of the Starship Enterprise. Straddling the consumer/producer boundary, Paul manages to play both roles simultaneously - as do many fans of cult media.

This interview is part of a wider project that aims to approach the question - central to Cultural Studies - of the relationship between culture and politics, from a new direction. Rather than taking abstracted concepts from political philosophy - such as 'ideology' and 'hegemony' - and using them to read political stances from texts, which are then imposed on readers, the project approaches the relationship from the other side: by asking people who consume particular texts (through choice) to articulate their own politics, and to discuss these in relation to the program they choose to watch. In this way, it is hoped that the relationships between 'culture' and 'politics' can be understood in a more nuanced way than is possible with the use only of determinedly high-level political-philosophical concepts.

The interview is annotated in two ways: firstly to suggest how the discussion might be relevant to thinking about relationships between culture and politics; and secondly to facilitate interpretation of some of the slightly more opaque discussions of Doctor Who it includes.

AM: How would you describe your own politics?

PM: God. Ehm. I'm quite lazy, in the sense of watching things and being cross [comments like this in the interviews for this project have brought home to me just how limting is the Marxist-derived political philosophy so often employed by Cultural Studies for trying to understand everyday political thinking and behaviour. There is, in the cold-war binary ethos of reactionary/progressive - or cognate terms - by which we continue to judge culture, no place for the messy, contradictory and everyday politics which most people live. A conscious awareness that one finds it difficult to 'watch things and be cross' - an inspired definition of traditional politics - is surely not the same thing as simply being 'reactionary', or 'progressive']… and everybody's appalled that I don't make stand-up statements about things, and didn't vote at the last election, because it was raining. But it's obvious, even to me, that that's a cover up for something else. I would resent the suggestion that it's my generational apathy. I think I'm a more engaged than that. But Jeremy's [Paul's boyfriend] always amazed that I know as little as I do about things.

AM: Do you think of yourself as political in any sense?

PM: Yes, I do. I still hope you're making statements of some kind, you're producing [culture], so you're always engaged with it, every act you do is political. And because I can't let go of things, I will bang on about things. I think I probably am political. Yeah, I get worked up about things. I think because I came up through a generation of very serious people involved in student politics, I kind of removed myself from that, kept away from it, but I do get worked up.

AM: What do you get cross about?

PM: Privilege, ease, stupidity, ignorance, people making broad sweeping statements about things they know nothing about. The usual kind of race and gender stuff. Blair offering America anything they want, you know, like "Point us out any enemy you care to mention and we'll give you anything you want, because this is democracy and freedom" - just the stupidity of that, toadying.

AM: Is that linked to a political project?

PM: I suppose it's about faith, responding to moments of people allowing themselves to get sucked into some narrative not of their own making, that they've just kind of linked on to some kind of easy line. And I think it is about response to bad faith, it just comes easier to them just to go along with it and not think about it

AM: So you don't have a utopian vision?

PM: I think I used to. I'm not even sure what it was. But I don't think I do now. I think it's just about getting older. Realising the extent of my own bad faith.

AM: So you're not waiting for the revolution to come?

PM: No, no. It's interesting in sixties novels, what's leaping out of Michael Moorcock and Doris Lessing is: "Well, it takes a lot of energy, doesn't it, to have a revolution, and we're dissipating it in talk". How do we get the energy back? And it's endless. I mean, it was the generation that spent its time waiting for the revolution to happen, it's going to happen the day after tomorrow. I left a place - the North East, working class North East - where there was none of that sense. You just got on with it. Intellectuals won't do it for you. And they never did. It's always this sense of disenfrachisement, coming from the North.

AM: How do you feel about traditional party politics?

PM: It's kind of like if you were going to talk about why Robbie Williams is really a continuation of the poetic tradition [a point I had made earlier in the discussion, making fun of English Professors who wail about the fact that 'young people' aren't interested in poetry anymore - my position being that poetry has never had a bigger audience; it is simply set to music in youth culture], you'd have to work your way through that narrative, there's no easy jumping-in point, unless you just start to fictionalise it and make your own free-standing utterances. Same with politics, you see - I wouldn't do the long apprenticeship.

AM: Do you see your own writing as a political act?

PM: Yes. To start with, it was quite simple. I didn't know books that wrote about people or places or things that I knew. And I just assumed that that would be welcome. That's what fiction does, it shows you those things. And then realising that it doesn't. Literary fiction is as specialised and parochial as any genre. So breaking into that was always a political thing, rubbing their noses in it, this is what living in a new town in the seventies was. And you need to know about this, because this is a crucial moment that you will miss, because you're listening to Drabble, or whoever, going on about what they thought was important. That easy assumption that a degree from Cambridge or Oxford entitles you to salient cultural knowledge and this wealth of experience, that's nonsense. I think it would disqualify you. Shoving everything into the books, owning up to your own experience, that's political. And that does come from a position where you refuse to see the distinction between high and low culture - to bring in Sontag alongside Are You Being Served. You should be able to take that for granted. And it's not resistance from above, from the generations who went before. They love it - they all wanted to be doing that in the sixties. I think it's more from younger kids, really. They think it should be separated out, and nice and discrete. I think I'm always in a position of making things more complicated, and that's a political act. Saying, No, it's more complex than that. And more ridiculous than that. I think that's a political act.

AM: Is it about getting more aspects of culture, different groups of people into the public sphere? Working class culture becomes part of the public sphere, so you can no longer call them "the masses" and treat them as …

PM: Yeah, but that whole kind of politics of representation thing is something that's always pissed me off as well, because it is something that's easily co-opted. And it is repressive at one level, letting a few faggots on, doing their own shows on Channel 4 at midnight, and everything's OK then. I've never been interested in those distinctions. Which is why I've never got on with having my own TV show, which is something that could well have happened if I'd played the game nicely. You can have literary novels written by working class people about working class people, but they still have to obey certain rules, they still have to be Realist with a big R, still. Which is why we end up with Irvine Welsh. Or the new puritan thing where it's middle class boys loving working class culture and reinventing realism for this generation. It's entirely within its place, and it's quite nice but you're not allowed to take on what mainstream literary fiction's been doing at the same time, you can't respond to magical realism, you're not supposed to, that's being ridiculously ambitious. And you can't take all of that stuff and then write through a TV show for kids.