The Bells Of Saint John's
(Series 7, Dr 11 with Clara, 30/3/2013, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Colm McCarthy)
'Pokers and tongs
Say the bells of St John's
The feast of St Steven
and Dodo was crisp and even
Avoid the curfew
On the eve of St Bartholemew
Or time it will foister
On the Tardis bells of cloister
The bells of Wycombe High
Say...Beware of the wifi!!!'
Ranking: 197
In an emoji: 📲
A long time ago, in the year before Christopher Eccleston was the Doctor and The Spice Girls were only on their fourth comeback, I was challenged to write a Dr Who script of my own – something that reflected the ‘modern age’ we were living in during the early 2000s. Always one for a writing challenge I came up with ‘The Worldwide Web Of Fear’, in which the Great Intelligence try to take over people using their computers and phones via their wireless. It was loosely based on a story I’d had as a child, about aliens hiding in Ceefax and infiltrating an actual story (which, if nothing else, shows how old I am). After all, it’s such a very Dr Who concept: something you can’t see, that back then was so new it seemed to come from another planet altogether and which was alien and strange but was already so everyday that people didn’t really think about it. Also the internet is always being hacked by Earthly entities so why not alien ones too? This story adds an idea I never thought of about a ‘datacloud’ that stores people not documents: and yes, I don’t know how those work properly either(aliens I tell you!) I happily won my share of a bet over whether Dr Who could ever possibly work in the present day, uploaded it to the Dr Who fan fiction site ‘A Teaspoon And An Open Mind’ and sat back, waiting for fame and fortune to follow. I mean, it had been years since that Paul McGann thing and Who desperately needed a showrunner and anyway, I couldn’t do worse than that monstrosity… could I? The website turned it down. They said it was too far-fetched and not at all what Dr Who was about. So I stuck it up on an early version of my ‘Alan’s Album Archives’ blog instead, before taking it down in a panic when the BBC started going for copyright infringes on amateur websites (although it’s probably still around on a wayback machine, or even better a space-time travel machine, if you know a hacker with Clara’s skills). So imagine my shock when, perhaps a decade later, not only is Dr Who back on air but they are doing my very story! I have to say though, I’m not surprised (and no I don’t think for a second that my humble, ignored blog is where Steven Moffat got the idea – although scouring the internet for ideas on how to write a Doctor Who story about the internet would be suitably meta). Not even by the fact that they had the same villain as me so they could re-use the ‘Great Intelligence uses dumbed down social media’ ploy or that Moffat despite the similarities Moffat weaved an entirely different story to mine about such a subject so incredibly ripe for Dr Who (I mean, invisible technology that’s everywhere? What’s more Dr Who than that?!) To be honest I’m more surprised that it took until 2013 to get there in a story that takes the ordinary and mundane-ness of social media and makes them extraordinary.
I must confess there were a lot more jokes and puns in mine, even though this story still has far more jokes than we’re used to seeing from Moffat. This story gets bonus points for some of my very favourite gags in all of Who in fact. Clara phones up the Tardis thinking it’s an internet helpline (having been handed the very rare number by Missy, not that we find that out for another year and a half), the Doctor having spent the time since the ‘Snowmen’ Christmas special secluded in a Cumbrian monastery in the Middle Ages and mourning not only Amy and Rory but two separate versions of Clara. The monks complain that the ‘bells of Saint John’ keep ringing: you expect they mean a religious bell but no – ‘bells’ is also an archaic word for a ringing telephone and ‘Saint John’ is the ambulance who once had a first aid kit in police telephone boxes for real and who still advertise the fact on the Tardis doors (or at least they do for the 1st, 3rd, 11th and 12th Dr Tardises, with no explanation for why the label comes and goes – presumably just the Tardis in a mood). When Clara rings the Doctor complains that it’s ‘1207’ and she can’t possibly be ringing him about the internet. She looks at the clock and comments that it’s half past three for her: ‘Are we in different timezones?’ she asks. ‘You could say that’ says the Doctor scowling from under his monk’s robes. The Doctor referring to the Tardis as a ‘surprisingly mobile phone’ is another all-time favourite gag (I had it changing its appearance as it changing a phone casing in a draft of mine). I’m very fond of the line ‘It’s a time machine – you never have to wait for breakfast!’ When Mahler, Miss Kizlet’s underling, comments on tracking down the Tardis he comments that ‘are we sure this time? Earl’s Court is an embarrassment’ (the site of Britain’s lone original police telephone box from the pre-Who days!) There’s a classy dig at the media treatment of the 2011 London riots (unemployed youngsters in a credit crunch being ticked off for not being pro-active enough looking for work when there were thousands of applicants for every job and the Coalition government had just cut funding to every single thing that made living in England back then bearable, treated as some sort of opportunistic treason) and how the Great Intelligence can’t use that excuse’ every time they run into trouble. And one of the greatest most Doctory lines of them all: ‘I can’t tell the future – I just happen to work there’. Delightful. Line by line, word by word, ‘Saint John’ is one of my favourite stories.
Steven Moffat was interviewed a few years ago and commented that comedy was an intrinsic part of Who and that without it the show might be too horrible to watch – and he’s dead right. Take the wise-cracking script away and this feels like an entirely different sort of story, more the sort of gut-wrenching 15 certificate technological psychological horror of a ‘Black Mirror’ episode (Charlie Brooker’s series also being n the ether having started in 2011). Moffat got the idea when travelling back from a convention in America on a train and watching the different ‘hotspot’ icons coming up on his laptop every time he changed states – without knowing what any of these alien sounding names were. The idea that there’s something alien lurking in your wifi waiting to eat you if you accidentally click on the wrong service provider is the sort of thing that will make adults hide behind the sofas (where the wifi is blocked) never mind children and the panicked desperation of the people it takes, trapping them apparently forever in some sort of alien datacloud, is horrific enough as it is (actually members of the production team with a handful of extras ‘Brian Of Morbius’ style: production secretary Scott Handcock, brand manager Edward Russell, Midnight Oil – the company in charge of organising stray props involving bits of telly or photos like this – employee Matt Andrews. That’s also the petty cash buyer seen being sucked up from Google Plus, the production assistant disappearing from Facebook, the art director and graphic artist dematerialising from twitter, the production buyer being captured from Flickr and the art department co-ordinator disappearing from Foursquare. In addition, if you listen very carefully to the radio playing in the background of some scenes that’s meant to be giving inane mundane chatter you can hear some in-jokey references: there really was a complaint made by assistant script editor John Phillips over his hotel neighbour production assistant Sam price and her love of playing Elvis records, Who drama ‘An Adventure In Space and Time’ script editor Orchard Cookson is quoted with a story about a dog correctly guessing the winners of a European football match which was an anecdote he’d once told over lunch and assistant co-ordinator Gabrielle Ricci is quoted as singing with her beloved pet horse as part of the fictional show ‘Welsh Entertainment Spectacular’).
It’s worse still for the humans left behind, who watch their loved ones being turned into ‘Spoonheads’ that turn them into zombies and have them turn round eerily with bits of their heads missing (something tells me that as a dad Steven Moffat is very strict with his children’s screen-time in case they all turn out to be zombiefied). One of the most powerful scenes comes right at the end when big baddy way Miss Kizlet (leading actress Ceilia Imrie really enjoying herself) has her mind returned to her by The Great Intelligence, reverting back to being a child when UNIT come into her office and find her: the idea that someone can just come along and hack your identity is such a Dr Who idea and the fact that you’re left having to rebuild your life fifty, sixty, seventy years after your identity was taken is one of those Who ideas that’s more terrifying than outright death (presumably The Great Intelligence somehow hacked Miss Kizlet as part of the early army internet trials, given the years). There’s another great creepy scene where the Great Intelligence doesn’t just hack people’s phones but people, having a very surreal conversation with the Doctor in a coffee shop where he’s buying cakes where the passers by all start talking to him (although, it has to be said, this is a scene already done better in ‘The Eleventh Hour’). All very effective, although we have had something similar in Dr Who before (‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ did much the same thing, just with televisions instead of the internet) and I do have to question why everyone’s brains uploaded to a data-cloud mean that we can still see them in the location they were taken, like their living rooms rather than some form of ‘white void a la ‘Warrior’s Gate’ or ‘The Mind Robber’.
The trouble is, as well as being smart and funny and genuinely creepy, a lot of this story ends up being silly too. The Who story that this one resembles most is ‘The War Machines’, a dark and brooding re-set button by a new production back in 1966 that wanted to make Who more of a psychological thriller and which introduced a giant computer that took ver the world from the newly built Post Office Tower (now the BT Tower). At the time this building was the tallest in London and loomed over the skyline, even though not that many people knew what it was actually for (the satellite radio antennae it used was futuristic indeed for the times). It was rare indeed for Who to be in contemporary London in this era and for many people watching it was the first time they could walk past a building that had been seen in Dr Who and go ‘wow, this could all be real!’ Moffat is after a similar idea as he re-sets the series again post Amy and Rory so he naturally turns to the same skyline. The Shard was a new complex that officially became London’s latest highest building when finished in July 2012, some eight months before this episode went on air, and similarly looks as if it was made by aliens, being all triangular and made out of glass, while few people watching could have told you what it actually does. In actual fact it’s a quirky combination of office space, residential homes, the main home of the Al Jazeera TV station and a business park, with additional space for restaurants open to the public and even a mini hospital of sorts (though no gift shop, which no doubt disappointed the Doctor no end). Here floor 65 (the tallest floor of flats in reality) becomes home to the Great Intelligence, who has a whole host of captured brainwashed people tapping into London’s wifi hotspots and security cameras, aiming to ‘upload’ as many people as possible. It’s a scene straight out of ‘The Demon Headmaster’ (the bits that come after taking over the prime minister’s brain – all of which was done already in ‘Aliens Of London/World War Three’ Not that the prime minister has much of a brain lately, any of them). The Doctor gains access by riding a motorbike up the sides, even though we’ve never seen him ride a motorbike before, in a scene where Matt Smith laughs about coming last in the ‘anti-grav’ Olympics. That definitely wasn’t in mine – even I thought something like that too ridiculous and that’s me saying that!) It’s one of the daftest sights in modern Who, not least because actually there’s nothing to stop him simply using the lift. Also…why? What is this grand plan? We just take it for granted that one of the, well, greatest intelligences in the universe is doing all this but we never find out what for. And if it’s a trap for the Doctor by taking Clara and getting his attention, well, he’s not very god at it is he? I mean he’s had hundreds of false starts already. And even in London over a period of years that many people going missing would just arouse suspicion the Intelligence really doesn’t need.
Ah yes, Clara. All of this plot is really just a background detail for the Doctor to get to know his new companion – for the third time. This happens a lot in series seven but particularly here; Clara is handed to us as so much of a mystery, with a series arc dedicated to the mystery of who she is and what her arrival might mean for the Doctor, that Moffat forgets to make her into a character. Especially this incarnation. The first Clara, ‘Soufflé Girl’ Oswin, is cheeky and all-knowing, running rings not only round the Daleks but the Doctor. ‘Asylum Of The Daleks’ draws you in wanting to know more – and then kills her off in a devastating final scene. The Victorian nanny Clara from ‘The Snowmen’, too, is a great little character: she’s prim and proper as befits her time but there’s also something very modern and timeless about her and she, too, dies in a scene at the end that leaves us devastated. Poor Jenna Coleman has to find a third way to make a third Clara interesting and she just can’t. Moffat’s idea of making her different is to make her modern, a tech-savvy nanny with wanderlust who can find out anything from social media in minutes and can hack into cyberspace faster than the Doctor, but this Clara just doesn’t ring true. That mystery, which is finally unravelled in ‘The Name Of The Doctor’, also means that all of those long lingering pontificating scenes about the mystery of who Clara might be are all null and void now we know. And after knowing it just makes this adventure all the stranger: Clara’s oddly flirtatious in what is simultaneously both a scary and weird situation. Just look at this situation from her point of view rather than the Doctor’s: there she is, responsible for two children (one young, one seemingly too old to need childcare) when the internet goes out and creepy things start happening. The guy she’s just phones up to sort it all out turns out to be more ET than BT and hangs around her house spouting gibberish about time travel and demanding to know who she really is. Although at first Clara tells him to get lost, soon she’s hooked and getting involved, carrying on even after she’s zapped by her wifi and collapses, waking up on her bed, this stranger having broken into her house and put her there before retiring to stare at her bedroom window from a deckchair in her driveway– the stranger who was flirting with her a few hours earlier. If I was Clara I’d be checking if my drink was spiked and phoning the police. Instead Clara chooses this moment to start joking with him about his Tardis being a ‘snogging booth’ and trusting him. You accept it all at the time because you think that Clara really does know more than she’s letting on, but as things turn out she really doesn’t: at this point in her life she’s utterly normal in every way. And she doesn’t act normal in the slightest. She’s also a rubbish babysitter: she doesn’t check with her kids once or panic about what might have happened to them. Then again nor does the Doctor: of all the strange things that have happened that day why does he pick up on the leaf in Clara’s book and starting making that the ‘big mystery’ (as opposed to, I don’t know, Clara’s ability to hack computers when he can’t and her lack of surprise at any of this).
Too much of this story is taken up with her and the Doctor doing their weird variation of flirting, but it’s not something comfortable that comes to either actor and a lot of these scenes that try so hard to be funny feel more like the creepy half of this story. At the time the mystery was more annoying than ever in this story because it still isn’t solved by the end of it (Who is she? Is she a time-traveller? Is she a spy? Does she really know the Doctor and she’s lying?) and we’d already waited so many months since ‘Asylum’ to find out what it could be. We now know, from dozens of stories later, that Clara got hold of the Doctor’s number thanks to Missy but that part is just sort of ignored for now- why? This could have been a really big mystery that set the story moving further and it’s not like Moffat to ignore a mystery (it could be that he was having problems getting Missy right so didn’t bring her in till the following year, but it’s odd that the Doctor doesn’t march straight to the shop that gave out his number – if only to stop anyone else calling it). This Clara isn’t as well drawn or as interesting as the other two. Then Moffat chucks everything into the long grass again and we don’t find out anything more by the end of the episode. The real trouble with this story is, it’s all a big set up for stuff that’s to come and not a story in its own right. Which is especially irritating at a time when we were looking for a pay off to the mystery of clara that’s been running for so many months now. As clever as this story is, as well written as it is, this is where fan patience begins to wear thin.
This is, at least, a great episode for Matt Smith. This Doctor is all over the shop: one minute he’s grieving, the next he’s been given a mystery (and this Doctor likes nothing more than a good mystery!) he doesn’t yet know what Clara is to him so doesn’t know whether to fear her or flirt, so her sort of does both. For the most part this confusion works: we’re so used to seeing this Doctor with all the answers that it’s a whole new part of his character. With Amy and Clara gone he’s now the main focal point and he’s rarely better in a story that calls on his full range from impossibly old alien to overgrown kid. He’s a terrific sulky monk in Cumbria, delivers one-liners with panache (the scene of him leaving a plate full of Jammie Dodgers for an unconscious Clara to help her recuperate is so very 11th Doctor – she got lucky not to end up with the fish custard!), has fun being a sort of cyberspy and has a great time squaring off against Ceilia Imrie. But it also leads to some very odd lines where matt smith has to act sexy. And he should never act sexy. It’s not too bad for now but in time this angle is going to lead to some very un-Dr 11 things coming out of his mouth. Even here it seems out of character for someone whose trying to be protective first and foremost. As it happens the Clara romance aspect is dead in the water but at the time there was a collective groan that we going to get yet another subplot of the dr falling in love in 21st century who. Most surprising of all is how at home he is as a motorbike hero (normally this Doctor can’t even walk in a straight line comfortably) and the scene of him driving a motorbike out of the Tardis doors, impossibly, is one of the era’s best (and must have stretched the computer team to their limits: actually it was an empty prop box Matt Smith simply drive through on location with the Tardis interior added). This story has one of the other of the era’s all-time greatest moments too: Clara’s first trip inside the tardis where the camera actually follows in one apparent full shot from her garden to the inside to a crashing plane in seconds flat, following her as the plane lurches downwards and starts crashing – it’s one of the greatest ‘look what we can do!’ shots in the entire sixty year run, up there with the very first Tardis reveal shot in 1963 and the panning model shot at the start of ‘Trial Of A timelord’. Only, instead of that being the show’s only money shot on which they blew all the budget or the year, they just keep on coming in this story. Unfortunately Moffat runs out of time to draw anyone else that well; Clara might share the screen-time but she doesn’t get any similarly great scenes and it’s a true waste of Ceilia Imrie and Richard E Grant both (was everyone busy and double-booked that week?!)
The result is a really good promising Dr Who episode for the most part, with some of my favourite scenes, that still ultimately becomes a story I’m not all that keen on by the end. ‘Bells’ just loses it’s ap-peal and runs out of steam midway through after all the good ideas have been used up and it has to cram a solution into the second half, collapsing completely at the end when we switch from character to plot and have yet another showdown against a female villainess whose clearly modelled on Cruella De Vil in an exotic location base (and we’ve already had hundreds of those). After being treated to the ‘Twilight Zone’ style twists at the end of ‘Black Mirror’ this most Charlie Brooker of episodes just does the same old same old (although no Black Mirror episode would ever have come up with anything so Dr Whoy as a motorbike up the Shard or the Spoonheads). After such a build-up to finally meeting Clara and who she might be, with speculation reaching fever pitch after the unique break mid-series this year, it’s disappointing indeed to get what ends up being just another bog standard Who episode with characters who don’t have any depth to them. Not to mention one that recycles so much from past stories: not just ‘The Eleventh Hour’ and ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ but ‘Silence In the Library’ too (the Spoonheads are just the library interaction devices) and ‘The Empty Child’ too (as catchphrases go ‘I don’t know where I am’ is no ‘are you my mummy?’ either). The devious scheme, which seemed so solid just a few minutes earlier, is now ended because the Doctor basically hacks the hackers and turns their scheme on them (seriously, he calls himself The Great Intelligence and he didn’t see that plot twist coming?!). Such a great idea (and I don’t say that just because it was also mine!), so many great one-liners…and yet this story ends up ultimately being a collection of scenes that work really well interspersed with ones that don’t work at all, a story that ends up being disappointing because it wastes all that promise and doesn’t move the story arc any further on than it was before. When asked by Doctor Who Magazine for the 50th story poll to give an example of a story he thought ended up being ‘middling’ Moffat nominated this one an example of an episode he thought of straightaway – not a disaster, not a career high (indeed the story was one that was right in the middle of the whole poll and is not a million miles away from the middle of mine); that’s about right I’d say –a lot works in this episode but a couple of things drag it down and for all the clever inventive ideas thrown into this one there are a lot of bits and pieces recycled from other places that used it better too. Still, if nothing else it made Clara’s third debut very different to the other two, added some new twists and turns to the usual Who formula and made me scared to use my wifi the night it was on so, job done! In fact my internet’s playing up a bit now and has probably been taken over by alien monsters and ahdfgfgdkagdgfjkfgdkfghdklfklghbslfhfgh [DELETE! Exterminate! Kroll! The quest is the quest! There’s no such thing as Macra! Eldrad Must Live!] Do not be alarmed. Your book feed will return to normal shortly. We hope.
POSITIVES + Even weirder for me than predicting half the story is that it starts in a monastery near Carlisle where I used to live. Most cities aren’t named in Who and of those that are 90% are just London, where indeed the rest of this story is set. Spooky! Especially as the 12th Doctor and Clara end up being so rude about Carlisle in ‘Hide’ just three stories later. The scenes of Matt Smith mourning Clara a second time and wanting to stay away from everyone is some of his best work and a side of the 11th Doctor, the most puppyish and in many ways friendly of all his incarnations, we don’t often see. It’s great that we see the Tardis prop as a working phonebox again too – I’m always surprised writers don’t use it more, given that phoning for help is what a police telephone box was originally for (‘Logopolis’ and ‘The Empty Child’ are two earlier examples than do this, but three stories isn’t many out of 300-odd).
NEGATIVES - The execution of the whole datacloud thing is a bit clumsy and a little too close to the sea of faces on the TV in ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’. In fact the whole ending is clumsy and ripped wholesale from the superlative ‘Demon Headmaster’ books and TV series which did this sort of thing better years ago. The Demon Headmaster himself, Terence Hardiman, had only just been in Dr Who and ‘The Beast Below’ – he was one of the first people Moffat cast as showrunner in fact – so may have been on his mind (Terence’s wife played Liz Shaw’s mum over in the Big Finish Dr Whos too, practically making him family).
BEST QUOTE: ‘Suppose there was something living in the Wi-Fi, harvesting human minds, extracting them. Imagine that. Human souls trapped like flies in the World Wide Web, stuck for ever, crying out for help’. Clara: ‘Isn't that basically Twitter?!’
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: A red button prequel where the Doctor sits on a swing and discusses his feelings of loss with a little girl. Asking her for advice, she says when she loses something she goes looking for it so he does the (spoilers) kicker being that it was Clara as a girl all along. One of the weaker prequels to be honest that doesn’t add much, seems very out of character and hangs on a whacking great coincidence; a lot of issues for something that’s only a minute long.
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