Moranthology (15 page)

Simm is keen to illustrate just what he and Tennant have gone through to thrill this new generation of
Who
fans—just how far their dedication extends.

“We were shooting one scene, just me and David, on top of this deserted mountain top. We're giving it our all when, from fuck knows where, you can hear the faint sounds of an ice cream van. David carries on, so I thought well, I'm not going to stop if you're not going to stop. So we carried on right to the end—despite the fact that this must be the only ice cream van in existence that does the theme tune to
The Benny Hill Show
. The least inter-galactic sound imaginable!”

He shakes his head.

“We were, looking back, very professional that day.”

F
or Season Three, the BBC have taken the publicity for
Doctor Who
out of their own, often ramshackle, house, and placed it in the hands of Taylor Herring—PR to Robbie Williams,
Big Brother
and Al Gore.

The new PR team, seemingly more aware of just how much interest there is in the show, have accordingly ramped up the screenings of the first two episodes. While screenings normally consist of a small room, forty scruffy journalists and a table of coffee and buns, the
Who
screenings are treated like a movie premiere. Outside the Mayfair Hotel, fans scream as a phalanx of paparazzi snap at the guests. While the celebrities do, by and large, look like someone took a van down to the BBC canteen and shouted, “Anyone want to come and watch
Doctor 'oo
?”—Ian Beale, Michelle Collins, Reggie Yates—there is also Jonathan Ross, Catherine Tate and Dawn French.

Freema Agyeman is wearing a pair of £4,000 earrings, and both David Tennant and Russell T. Davies are resplendent in sharp suits, and working the line of TV crews like pros.

At the beginning of the screening there is, momentarily, no sound. The TARDIS, iconic as ever, spins through electric-blue spacetime to complete silence. Then the audience, as one, begins to sing the theme-tune themselves: “Oooo WEEE oooooo/OOOO ooo.” There is even an impressive counter-accompaniment of “De duddle le dum/De duddle le dum.” It's a moment of happy, communal rejoicing.

Russell T. Davies floats around, looking as joyous and serene as someone recently voted “The Third Most Powerful Man in British Show Business” should, upon pulling off another considerable success.

“The show is simply one of the best ideas ever, really, isn't it?” he says, dragging on a ciggie and beaming. “So simple, yet so complex. How can you not love a sexy anarchist, roaming through time and space?”

When asked if—given that
Doctor Who
has now, to all intents and purposes, over-taken
EastEnders
as the BBC's flagship show—a larger budget would be more useful, he says a series of vaguely blustery and on-message things before roaring, dramatically, “Yes! Yes! Yes, I want more money, goddamnit!”

And it's hardly surprising that he does, considering that
Who
is still not being shot in HD—surely a foolish short-term economy, given the show's inevitably longevity in repeats and DVD sales.

But in all, “I am a happy man,” Davies sighs, exhaling, and staring across the room at the Doctor, his assistant, and a circle of a dozen grown adults, all squealing with excitement about being about to touch the TARDIS. “A very happy man.”

And he should, perhaps, feel a quiet satisfaction. After all, in a world where very little is a surprise, and everything is viewed with cynicism,
Doctor Who
is a genuine rarity. It represents one of the very few areas where adults become as unashamedly enthusiastic as children. It's where children first experience the thrills and fears of adults, and where we never know the exact ending in advance. With its ballsy women, bisexual captains, working-class loquaciousness, scientific passion and unremittingly pacifist dictum, it offers a release from the dispiritingly limited vision of most storytelling.

It is, despite being about a 900-year-old man with two hearts and a spacetime taxi made of wood, still one of our very best projections of how to be human.

 

Last piece for this section—on the curious phraseology of the anti-choice movement in America. “A gift.”

T
HIS
I
S
N
OT A
G
IFT

T
here's something disturbing about the idea of someone pressing something unwanted—wholly unwanted—in your hands, saying, “It's a gift! It's a gift!”

And you demure, politely at first—saying, “How lovely, but no. I do not want this gun/modern sculpture too large for my house/a sack of oysters—to which I am allergic—thank you. It is lovely that you thought of me: but no.”

But the insistence increases.

“It's a GIFT,” they insist, forcing it into your palm. “A PRESENT. YOU MUST HAVE THIS GIFT.”

And now your hands are bleeding, and you're truly alarmed, and you try to back away. But you find that the law is changed, overnight, and you are legally obliged to take this gift—even as you stand there with your hands torn, saying, “But surely a gift is something wanted? Something
suitable?
A stranger's hand putting something into my pocket is the same as a stranger's hand taking something
out
of my pocket. Really, there should be no hand there at all.”

And the gun goes off, and the sculpture is wedged in the doorway, immovably, and the oysters leak, slowly, onto the floor. Things that would have been wanted elsewhere cause chaos here. They do not fit, and they cause grief. And the stranger walks away from you. Having pressed his gift upon you, his work is done. And you do not understand why he ever came to your door.

Republican candidate Rick Santorum's comment that, if his fourteen-year-old daughter were raped, and became pregnant, he would not want her to have an abortion—but think of the baby as a “gift” from God—has been one of the defining quotes of the year.

As contraception and abortion become, yet again, controversial—the UK facing the second proposal, in as many years, for pro-life organizations to counsel women wanting an abortion; in the US, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum speaking out against contraception, even for married couples—the idea of babies as a “gift” becomes a pivotal one.

“Gift” is a key concept. If all babies are a “gift,” then a pregnant woman seeking abortion becomes unforgivably “ungrateful.” Similarly, contraception is bad, because it is the rejection of yet more “gifts.”

Let us think of all the inferences of “gifts.” If I give you a gift, it is usually a surprise. It is probably something you would not have gotten for yourself. And after I have given it to you, I would not see it again. I leave you with the gift. Gift-giving leaves the person who receives the gift essentially powerless—not a problem if it's an incongruously brightly colored wristwatch; a great deal more so if it's a human being for whom you bear responsibility for the rest of your life.

Babies being “given” to women as gifts makes the women sound powerless. Just something that a present was put onto, like a bookcase, or a shelf—rather than a reasoning adult, who decided they were ready to be a mother, instead.

Calling a baby “a gift” also sounds—let us be honest—like the phrasing of someone who has not spent much time bringing up children. It seems unfair to use visceral language to describe the reality of parenthood—but as anti-choice, anti-contraception campaigners are quite happy to use visceral language themselves (“slut,” “prostitute,” “whore,” “murder”), I have to presume they would be all right with it.

From the shop floor of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, here's what that gift can entail: tearing, bleeding, weeping, exhaustion, hallucination, despair, rage, anemia, stitches, incontinence, unemployment, depression, infection, loneliness. Death. Women still die in childbirth. Not as many as used to—but notably more die than while receiving any other “gifts,” such as scented candles, or long weekends. Additionally, “gift” sounds hopelessly inadequate to describe your children, whom you would die for in a heartbeat, inhale like oxygen, and swoon over like lovers. I have never done this over a foot spa or vase.

The worry of the anti-abortion and anti-contraception campaigners is that women rejecting these “gifts” are rejecting the gifts of Nature, or God. It is in obeisance to them that we should not turn to contraception, or abortion. But Nature, of course, turns to contraception and abortion all the time: the diseases that make you barren; the sperm-counts that fall to zero. Blocked tubes and blown wombs and the thousand sorrows of the infertile. The one-in-three first pregnancies that end in miscarriage—miscarriage that is just like abortion, we must remember—a potential life ended—except miscarriages are unwanted, and often dangerous; while abortions are safe, and wanted.

Nature also, clearly, believes in non-procreative sex: for twenty-seven days a month, sex is non-procreative. Sex after menopause is non-procreative. Statistically, most sex is non-procreative. Clearly, sex
isn't
just for procreation: it's also for the creation of happiness, or excitement, or contentment.

Those things that really are gifts; and are always wanted. Those things that do not scare me, when pressed upon me.

 

Part Three

P
ARENTING,
P
OLITICS, AND THE
P
OSH

In which we boggle over
Downton Abbey
, mount a defense of parental binge drinking, discuss the heaviness of poverty, and call for Lola from
Charlie and Lola
to be rubbed out forever. But before that, a domestic interlude.

 

While my job involves a lot of brief, yet incongruously intimate, encounters with all kinds of people, my ability to just “get on” with anyone—put them at their ease, make time with me a pleasant experience—is never more pertinently exposed than in the late night conversations I have with my husband. In many ways, I feel these chats encapsulate marriage in a nutshell: one person bursting with ideas they feel they can only share with one, special, most-beloved; the other just wanting to go the fuck to sleep.

A
LL THE
W
AYS
I
'VE
R
UINED
Y
OUR
L
IFE

I
t's 12:04 am. I'm on the woozy half-slide of sleep; the cotton-wool duvet of more weightless thought. There's something about my teeth growing bigger. I'm falling, leg first, into a dream.

“Cate.” It's my husband, sitting up next to me.

“Wh?”

“Cate.” He, apparently, is not falling asleep.

“Wh?”

“I've just found your Mooncup under my pillow.”

For those who have never come across one, a Mooncup is a . . . lady thing, which you use at . . . lady-time, to do . . . lady-business. For some reason, I always seem to be losing them—then finding them in unexpected places. The second most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me is having my best friend's one-year-old son walk into the kitchen, my Mooncup wedged in his mouth, like a pacifier. I still can't talk about the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me. Needless to say, I was not expecting to see that twenty-one-year-old accountant on my landing at that particular moment.

“Why is your Mooncup under my pillow?” Pete asks. Oh dear.

“I wondered where it was!” I say. Maybe my cheeriness at having found it again will infect Pete, and he will be happy for me.

“I'm not happy for you about this,” he says. “If that's what you're thinking.”

“I am sorry,” I say. “It is just the way of my Mooncup. It is like all scissors and cheese graters—I never, ever know where they are. They seem to flit between parallel worlds. It's mad!”

“I don't think your Mooncup has made it to underneath my pillow via string theory,” Pete says, still looking quite awake. “Because it's one of many, many of your things that have ended up in the wrong place, and I don't think even an infinite universe has that many wormholes.”

“What do you mean?” I say.

Clearly I am not going to sleep any time soon. Pete is obviously a little het up about this. I have to say, I find this desire to chat during sleepy time somewhat thoughtless. I would never do this.

“Well, yesterday I found a slice of half-eaten bread and Marmite on top of my Pentangle boxed set,” Pete says, sounding genuinely quite annoyed. “I was going to have a go at the kids—until I recognized the gigantic, foot-wide mouth print of the person who'd been eating it.”

“Me?” I say.

“Well, it was either you or a wandering T-Rex,” he says. “You appear to have the mouth span of something that can dislocate its lower jaw and eat a piano, whole.”

“Well, that's not so bad, is it?” I say. “Toast on a CD? After all, they do look like coasters. They're easy to wipe clean. In a survival situation, they'd be an obvious substitute for melamine picnic plates. I think that's quite reasonable.”

“You just shouldn't leave your lunch on my records!” Pete says, sounding a little bit emotional. A bit like a woman, I have to say. “I wouldn't—” he casts around for a comparable event “—put a pork pie in your handbag.”

“I wouldn't mind if you did,” I say, reasonably. I am very reasonable.

“I know you wouldn't!” he says. “I've seen you put falafel in the glove compartment! You have very low standards of hygiene! After sixteen years, I accept that in you! I just don't accept it in you on my stuff!”

“Is it so bad?” I ask. I'm rather hurt. I have improved my standards since we've been together. When I moved into his flat, in 1996, I brought two black garbage bags of dishes with me. Dirty dishes. That was by way of my trousseau. In one bag, there was an ashtray. Full. But I wouldn't do that now. I have changed.

“You leave your dirty tights in the kitchen. I found one of your flip-flops in my computer bag. Yesterday, I took my Oyster card out of my coat and it had one of your blister pads stuck to it—I had to stand at Holborn peeling it off. You threw my Le Creuset oven glove out of the window.”

“I've already done a column on that,” I say. “To my mind, it's been dealt with.”

“I came down after one drinking session and found you'd stubbed your fag out on Nancy's special 
Little Mermaid
 plate,” Pete continues. “You try to squeeze the blackheads on my nose when I'm driving; you come in and start conversations with me when I'm on the toilet; you've ruined all the BBC Four reruns of 1976's 
Top of the Pops
 by repeatedly saying, ‘I hope when the punks finally turn up, they've got GUNS and KILL J. J. Barrie.' ”

“Is this,” I say, hopefully, “one of those arguments where you list all of the ways I've ruined your life—but, by the end of it, you feel oddly saucy, and the argument segues into some sex? Like in
Moonlighting
?”

“And you compare everything to 
Moonlighting
, even though you know I've
never
seen it,” Pete says.