The Inner World of Doctor Who by MacRury Iain; Rustin Michael;

Author:MacRury, Iain; Rustin, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

CHAPTER EIGHT

Inside the whale: The Beast Below

There are two stories of childhood to preface the main events of the The Beast Below. They are told in vignettes that might be headed, “Lightness” and “Weight”.1 The prologue scenes introduce a heavy, grey space city, floating as if recently detached from a planet surface, voyaging through the galaxy. Its concrete metropolitan facades are labelled. One by one they show familiar British county names; Surrey, Devon, Essex, Yorkshire, Kent. We connect county names to the huge faded Union Jack on the rim of the vast ship and realise this is some space-bound version of the United Kingdom,2 a whole country compressed into the form of a city, and found now drifting through the stars. Green pleasantness has been eradicated, the body of the nation re-rendered in the tower block form of Starship UK.

Inside presents a chilling classroom scene. Education, rarely off the political agenda, is placed front and centre in this episode. The classroom provides an effective dramatic mechanism appealing to the younger audience members by referring to school, and to older generations by evoking nostalgia of sorts; the classroom décor and uniforms resemble a 1960s or 1970s era of tatty tables, desks, and rows.

There is no technology of the kind that might be expected on a starship. It is the kind of schoolroom that many of us might remember, but in space. There is no teacher. Instead, homework results are given back by a haunting, ceramic-mechanical amusement park clown head in a dead-tone voice. Its monotone praises the lined-up children, each by name, “good” or “very good”. The sense of threat and fear in them is very apparent, despite the praise. We later learn that this voice-in-a-head is a “Smiler” because it has a fixed grin on its face.

The depiction of the school continues the scene-setting. We have seen the city and the nation compressed. Now, completing the vignette, we have a snapshot of the state, with the school synecdochically referencing a state system that we can presume presides in this hefty, grey Starship UK.

The threat in the atmosphere is fulfilled. One pupil, the last in the line, Timmy, is graded zero. Now the Smiler’s face swivels to show its mean other side. It is literally two-faced, split between good and bad visages, but also always speaks in monotone. The Smiler’s angry frown underlines menace: “Bad boy, Timmy.”

We become aware that this is a society divided and bearing secrets. Timmy is barred from riding in the lift on account of his bad mark. Mandy, a friendly girl reminds him, despite her kind disposition, that she can’t go in a “vator” with “a zero”. Mandy has partly internalised the “ideological maxims” (Bollas, 2011, p. 84) of Starship UK, despite her friendly disposition and a hopeful promise to wait for Timmy. A hostile-looking monk-policeman affirms the prohibition with a glare. Timmy is left to travel alone.

Timmy instead enters a separate lift; a jingle advertises “candy burgers”. Our attention is captured by an old-style TV

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