Long Ben's Ghost: The Smugglers

"Long Ben" Avery, whose name does not appear, in fact to have been Ben, or Avery, for that matter *Henry Every is apparently correct), casts a rather longer shadow in literature and pop culture than might seem reasonable. The Pyrates (1983), George MacDonald Fraser's "burlesque fantasy on every swashbuckler I ever read or saw," portrays Avery as an unabashed hero who pretends to go rogue in order to rescue his lady love and her cantankerous father. He's about as nuanced in Fraser's telling as The Great Leslie in Blake Edwards's The Great Race. Under his own name, he appears as the sympathetic antihero in 2011's Doctor Who episode The Curse of the Black Spot, and later sails to the Eleventh Doctor's side in A Good Man Goes to War.

But his treasure is the chief bone of contention in The Smugglers, a four-parter in which the Doctor, Polly, and Ben find themselves in 17th Century Cornwall, landing on a beach near a church tended by the lone churchwarden Joseph Longfoot, a former member of Avery's crew. Longfoot, at first suspicious of the the travelers, comes to trust the Doctor, and, swearing he has reformed, trusts him with a riddle that will unlock the mystery of Avery's lost treasure.

The Doctor, Polly, and Ben go into town to an inn. Meanwhile Longfoot is ambushed by his old cremate, the inaptly named Cherub, who fails to get the secret from Longfoot, and kills him, having learned that travelers had spoken with him recently. Cherub kidnaps the Doctor, the local Squire jails Polly and Ben, who cannot account of their whereabouts and are thus suspects for Longfoot's murder, and the evil pirate Captain Pike (also an alumnus of Avery's ship), lulls the Squire (a smalltime smuggler, along with the innkeeper Kewper) into a "partnership" that will be very one-sided. Oh, and the pirates have managed to capture and tie up Josiah Blake, the "King's revenue man" sent to end the smuggling, a more somber performance from John Ringham who you really must remember from The Aztecs, where he played the barking mad, scenery-chewing Tlotoxl.

I think of all the lost episodes, this is the one I wish would be found. The recon I watched for parts 1-3 was not up to Loose Cannon's standards, but even Part 4, which was LC, was harder than usual to follow. It's a pity, because this one is action packed, with plot and counter-plot, and I strongly suspect it might rank near The Gunfighters for sheer entertainment value. It's less funny--though Hartnell flattering and charming the half-aware-he's-being-gulled Captain Pike (a splendid performance by Michael Godfrey is very funny, as is his scene faking out the pirate guard Jamaica by pretending to tell fortunes so that he and Kewper can escape.

The story darkens as it goes on, and has some pretty grim death sequences--Jamaica's death at Pike's hands is pretty rough, to name but one, but this is the sort of pirate story Fraser was lovingly lampooning in The Pyrates, and it's a pretty good job, insofar as we can see from the recon and the audio. The notion that everyone mistakes Anneke Wills's Polly for a boy (seriously, even the tele snaps give that game away) is treated as a running gag,almost as if anticipating Strax's inability to recognize human gender.

Escape is important here; Polly and Ben get back into the game by rather cruelly convincing the village idiot left to watch them that he is cursed by the Doctor--a warlock--and that only they--his apprentices--can save him. So that gets them free.

The story has a three sides seeking the treasure--Cherub, Pike, and the Squire/Kewper nexus, and Blake, in consultation with the Doctor, trying to prevent Pike from massacring the townspeople. As Blake is delayed gathering a militia, and the pirates begin to load treasure (while drinking heavily on the job), the Doctor plays for time. He makes an agreement with Pike to give him the clue to Avery's treasure in return for Pike's guarantee that the townspeople will not be hurt, he keeps his word. How far we have come from the Doctor who would break faith and even kill to protect himself and (only incidentally) his companions in The Cave of Skulls!

The Doctor keeps his word, but will Pike? We never find out, though we're pretty sure the answer is no, because Avery's riddle and Cherub's treachery delay him long enough that Pike and the few of his pirates who were sober enough to not get killed in Blake's initial support, are caught in a losing battle with Blake. Pike fits to the end, nearly killing the Doctor with his last breath--the wounded Squire, who never meant things to go so far helps stop Pike. As the mop up ends, the TARDIS takes off and lands in an area so cold that the travelers can feel the chill inside.

One can catch his death in the cold.

Written From the Right?

Over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, the eternal debate of "is there any good conservative popular culture" has re-ignited. Stretching to find examples of any, the commenters have posited Yes, Minister and House of Cards (UK original). To be frank, as fans of both, I think neither fits the bill.

In both Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, Nigel Hawthorne's Platonic ideal of the obstructive civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby, is a quintessential cynic (see above), while the semi-competent (he fluctuates) is never identified as a member of a political party, although he is clearly leftward of Sir Humphrey. In both series, neither political party nor the Civil Service comes off well. This is not unlike The Thick of It (a spiritual descendant of Yes, Minister), in which both parties are satirized with equal vigor, and everybody is pretty deeply flawed. (Mind you, the store is considerably more gentle in Yes, Minister.) The system is the target, not one side or the other.

House of Cards is conservative, in its origins. But those origins stem from Tory-on-Tory political violence:

Before he began writing, Dobbs was a Conservative party backroom boy, scurrying up the chain of command from speechwriter to special adviser to chief of staff. He was serving as the latter when, on the eve of the 1987 election, he fell out spectacularly with his then boss, the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He was soon kicked into the political long grass, which was when he found time to write fiction.

“It all started because Maggie Thatcher beat me up and was actually rather cruel to me,” he says, looking softly out onto the Thames from a sunny spot on the Lords Terrace. “I don’t complain about that – politics is rough and tough. But it caused me great unhappiness for a while . . . [Despite] the fact that she could be absolutely horrid to me, I still regard her as being probably the greatest peacetime prime minister in the 20th century.”

It was on the day known as Wobble Thursday, exactly a week before polling day in ‘87. Thatcher was convinced she was losing the election (spoiler: she wasn’t), and “she took out all her pain and anger and frustration on me, when in fact I was perhaps the most innocent person in the room at the time”, says Dobbs with a sweet smile.

Soon after, the bruised former chief of staff found himself on holiday with his wife, sitting on the beach and scrawling two letters onto a piece of paper: “F U” – his soon to be protagonist’s initials, and a none-too-cryptic two fingers up at the page.

Dobbs now denies that the book was a revenge novel--but the picture he paints of his fellow Tories is darker than even most liberals would imagine. Also, to be frank, Dobbs's book ain't a patch on Andrew Davies's adaptations (and in fact Davies has offhandedly junked key components of Dobbs's plotting, rather hilariously transforming not one but two fatal defeats for FU into triumphs, leaving Dobbs in rather an awkward place in writing the sequels), and Davies self-identifies as a liberal.

For what it's worth, though I am emphatically not a conservative, I think there is good conservative popular fiction. It's never the stuff one thinks of, though, no more than is good liberal popular fiction. That's because fiction written to a thesis is almost always tendentious. It suffers from "try too hard" syndrome, whatever the political slant. But R.F. Delderfield's views are gently conservative, and those views inform his work. But he has a broad enough view of the world that non-conservatives can read his writings without feeling attacked. So, for example, To Serve Them All My Days may have a firebrand socialist minder's son as its protagonist, but his integration into a traditional boarding school as its Headmaster is its story arc. "Pow-Wow" never recants his socialist views, but they become less important to him than the well being of the local community of which he is the steward.

Likewise Simon Raven spreads the satire fairly evenly--he has Labour white hats as well as Tories, though the narrator's asides are pretty consistently conservative--sometimes acidly so. Likewise Susan Howatch's theology trends traditionalist in nature, though, like her fictional mystic Jonathan Darrow, I suspect that she is beyond party affiliation. Another favorite of mine, George MacDonald Fraser, was a crusty old Tory long before he was old. So I think it's fair to acknowledge that there is first rate writing from conservatives. I just don't see either House of Cards or Yes, Minister as fitting that category.

However, most of my examples are from a time of greater consensus. And this brings me back to my earlier point: Tendentious novels usually are less well done than those where character (or plot) drive the storyline. Ideological purity is bad for art. I would suggest that much American conservative writing in the last few years has been just that--ideological, and thus mostly bad art. The current conservative movement's sense of being contra mundum is just not good for the muse, unless held in check, any more than is a liberal sense of grievance. In Phineas at Bay, Sir William McScuttle, was a sincere effort to try to depict a 19th Century Social Darwinist, but, because I didn't spend as much time with him, lacked enough roundness to be entirely successful. (I think I did considerably better with Tories Savrola Vavasour and Frank Greystock).

Conservative art tends to not work because it's conservative before it's art.