‘Bev lay awake, hoping that Father Christmas would come, but the Tall Man came instead.
She could hear his voice in the front room, but her mother’s crying drowned his actual words. Mum had been upset all day, ever since she came home. Her mother had different sorts of tears – mostly anger, like when the kids from the Quadrant threw cigarette butts through the kitchen window; like when Carl got lost in the crowd on Jubilee Day, except he wasn’t lost, he was drinking cider with Beefy Jackson’s gang; or like when Dad left. But tonight, this was a crying Bev had never heard before.
Many years later, Bev would cry the same tears herself, and only then would she recognize what they meant. Only then, when it was too late.
..
Bev did not notice the man at first. He stood in one of Red Hamlets’ side alleys, next to the skips, in darkness. He must have edged forward a fraction, ambient light revealing a smudged impression of his clothing: a cream jacket, splattered with mud, and a battered white hat. The rim of the hat should have kept his face hidden, like that of the Tall Man, but despite the dark and the distance, Bev could see his eyes. They were looking at her.
Bev forgot her mother’s plight as she stared back at the little man. She thought he smiled at her, just a small smile, but one which gave no comfort. Bev thought of her storybook: of tales in which brave knights battled across swamps and mountains, fought dragons and eagles and witches, all to reach a wise old man who might have the answer to a single question. Bev always imagined that these old, wise, terrible men must have long white beards and flowing robes, but now she realized that they looked like this: small and crumpled and so very, very sad. The man lifted his head – Bev imagined he knew what she was thinking – then he returned his gaze to the two figures beneath the lamplight.
…
Bev heard the front door click and guessed from the noises that Mum had settled in the armchair. After a few minutes, there came the sound that had first alerted Bev to the mystery, that of her mother crying.
After twenty minutes or so, Bev fell into an uneasy sleep. She dreamt of snow, of tall men and small men, and of terrible bargains being made at night. ‘
Russell T Davies (1996)
‘I think, actually, when you’re young, you kind if think that all that death and disaster is marvellous and brilliant. You sit there, all grown up, thinking ‘That’s what the world is like’. But then as you get older, you get.. I don’t think you get softer, but you get wiser, and actually the world isn’t all death and disaster.. Well, it is actually! But I now see the point of writing is to find moments that aren’t death and disaster. That actually, happier endings are one of the most beautiful things about fiction, and you don’t need to kill everyone.’
Russell T Davies (2016)
‘For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand’
The Stolen Child – W.B. Yeats (1889).
Do you ever have a moment when you feel incredibly stupid not having realised something that should have been obvious to you? I’ve read ‘Damaged Goods’ before and I’ve listened to the BF adaptation, all of which contain characters quoting from the Yeats poem above. ‘The Stolen Child’ is a poem that I’ve known and loved since the 80’s. It wasn’t until I typed the name of the poem that I realised the connection with this story – the sentiment fits the content and feel of this story very well, but it is also a very direct and very obvious reference to a plot point – and one that is actually pointed out in the book and BF adaptation, so it isn’t even a sub-text. An example, there are many others, where the act of writing about these stories and having to concentrate on them more, subtly changes your perception and understanding of them.
Anyway to tell you why I feel differently about ‘Damaged Goods’ than when I first read it in the late 90’s/early 2000’s, I really need to tell you something about myself and what happens as you start to get old – some of you may recognise this, some may not, some may be yet to face this or may never.
Way back when – in my 20’s or 30’s my bookshelves were stuffed with everything from Burroughs and Bukowski to Zola, my stock of video tapes was filled with gritty, social-realist drama – from the likes of Ken Loach, Jimmy McGovern, Peter Flannery and Alan Bleasedale. However as you get older, life becomes less certain, the world around you that you once knew and the future you once envisaged changes in ways that you find inexplicable, certainties turn to doubt, confidence to trepidation. This bleeds in, at least for me into my choice of what I want to watch or read – those great, grim social-realist or existential works (old and new) that I once read or watched, I really can’t face any more – I don’t need any more of it. A new Jimmy McGovern series looks great – I know it is, but I pass on it – I need something to keep me cheery, something comforting, re-assuring and uplifting instead.
I’m not alone in this – the same condition afflicts my partner and many of my friends. Don’t get me wrong I lead a nice life – far more so than I could ever have hoped for or could even imagine growing up – so this isn’t just a load of whinging, just something that happens gradually to many people as you get older and become less care-free, adult concerns and responsibilities take over and the people you love pass away and the pillars that once supported your life start to crumble. Nick Hornby writes about it much more succinctly in his book ’31 Songs’ when talking about ‘Frankie Teardrop’ by the band ‘Suicide’, which he loved as a young man, but in comparison now instead wanted to listen to the warming, consoling, comforting pure sunshine pop of ‘Ain’t that Enough’ by ‘Teenage Fanclub’ (my favourite band too) – something that I can completely understand now. He says:
“I need no convincing that life is scary. I’m 44 and it has got quite scary enough already – I don’t need anyone trying to jolt me out of my complacency”.
So all of that was a very long winded way of saying that grim, supposedly real-life stuff can be easier to read or watch when you are younger and more care-free than when life has had a bit of a go at you and you are older! I suspect that the same might be true as a writer – the Russell T Davies of 2017 would approach this book differently than his younger 1996 counterpart – he indicates as much in the interview he gave for DWM when Big Finish adapted this story – I quoted this in the introduction. He muses on the attraction of the dark and gritty for young writers and the change in his writing that occurred while writing ‘The Grand’ and then ‘Queer as Folk’. ‘Damaged Goods’ has all of the grimness and death in spades – far too much really. It is anchored in ‘real life’ – but this is the most extreme form of real life, with very few chinks of light amongst the poverty, addiction and crime. Russell is famously ruthless with his characters in his TV Doctor Who – from Clive, to Raffalo, Lynda with a ‘Y’ all the way through to Harriet Jones – but here the cast are just slaughtered, in a variety of increasingly disgusting, creepy ways and eventually large parts of the city destroyed, one survivor left picking gold teeth out of corpses. It is almost a parody and is far, far too much for me – especially in the context of Doctor Who – the book became attritional, a struggle to reach the end this time around.
As you might expect from Russell, there is also some terrific stuff in this book. If you liked ‘Queer as Folk’, ‘Bob and Rose’ and ‘Second Coming’, then somewhere in ‘Damaged Goods’ is the missing link – a story that if stripped back to it’s core could have been made by Channel 4 or Granada in the late 90’s, probably by Red Productions and Nicola Schindler – I can see the cast, how it looks and it’s sits on my DVD shelf between the other Russell T Davies TV series. In amongst ‘Damaged Goods’ there is a really great story, from someone who was about to become one of the great dramatists on British TV. There is a bit of a problem though, actually there are two main problems for me – there is more than one story and the really interesting one doesn’t feel anything much like a ‘Doctor Who’ story and doesn’t really benefit much from The Doctor’s involvement. Looking for a future showrunner? My advice – have a look at that guy who wrote ‘Dark Season’ and ‘Century Falls’, not this one. There are parallels to be drawn and elements here that would be seen in Russell’s TV Doctor Who – but anyone expecting to draw a straight line from the Perivale of Survival, through the Quadrant here to the Powell Estate and Rose, is likely to struggle and be left scratching their head. The only common thread really is that the locations broaden what modern Doctor Who can be.
In my review of ‘Human Nature’ I explained that I didn’t really have any knowledge or frame of reference for the world of public schools, well here I honestly have no idea about the world of the Quadrant (the flats in this story). I grew up on a working class estate in Merseyside, not a council estate (some of it was, our bit wasn’t), but the sort where every Dad was a skilled or semi-skilled worker – craftsmen – electrician (my Dad), fitters, carpenters, plumbers, brickies etc. We had the odd middle class person quickly passing through on their way to better things – we didn’t have a lot of stuff or much money, but it is light years from the world depicted in this book.
It may have all been happening a few miles down the road, but that world is a different to the one that I grew up with – albeit in a time of mass unemployment that afflicted my world as much as anyone in the 80’s – as leafy, affluent, commuter town Surrey or indeed where I live now. I wouldn’t dream about writing about this world – I’d feel happier writing about Vortis or Zeta Minor. This is a grim world of drug dealing, gang violence and child prostitution, of illicit sex and guilt, alcoholism and self-harm. It is miles away from my own experience, but here’s the thing – I’m not sure how close it is to Russell’s either. He’s from Swansea and went to Oxford – now you don’t have to be from a world to write about it – but when it comes to living in the level of poverty, crime and depredation depicted here, if you haven’t lived it, it can feel uncomfortably like voyeurism. His writing of this can be really effective, but then you also have some curiously ‘Grange Hill’ BBC ‘street’ sounding things – names like “Beefy Jackson’ – really? It is like putting a character form the Beano into Trainspotting, And here’s another point – it might look similar but it is a very long way from the Powell Estate as well. Winnie Tyler is only similar to Jackie Tyler in that she is a Mum, has the same surname and isn’t well off – more of that later.
In amongst the mix of ‘Damaged Goods’ there is the story of the corpse of drug dealer (‘The capper’ = named after his practice of knee-capping people) possessed and re-purposed by a Time Lord weapon, cocaine that contains traces of the same thing – the n-form – something that was built to destroy vampires in the ‘old time’ and causes death and destruction here on a grand scale. I don’t have much interest in that whole story strand – it is there if you want it, there is also a whole lot of quite horrible body horror that is effectively written and stomach churning and an operatic ending that ties the two stories together in destruction on both a massive scale and a personal level.
The story strand that I’m interested in here (spoiler warning) is Russell’s answer to Wily Russell’s ‘Blood Brothers’ and is what gives the book its title. It is the story of two women – one rich, one poor. The rich one is desperate for a baby after a series of miscarriages and the poor one has twins and agrees to sell one of them. When the one she buys is ‘broken’ and she realises it is one of a pair, the rich one wants to exchange her ‘damaged goods’ for one that isn’t. See what I mean – a really great story – it is an RTD story, a Jimmy McGovern story, a Paul Abbot story – just not especially a Doctor Who story. It was considered for development as a series in it’s own right and I think that it is a real shame that didn’t happen – I would have it on my DVD shelf now. Instead it sits in a pile of ‘Doctor Who’ books and a download from Big Finish and involves the Seventh Doctor and his companions from the future – adjudicators Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej (don’t ask!) who don’t add a whole lot of value to the thing.
The Two Mothers
The two women – Eva and Winnie are the stars of the story for me. Russell really invests in these characters – giving them a history, motivation and he makes them by turns sympathetic and monstrous in some very clever writing.
Eva Jericho is a horrible woman, a monster – the sort you could find in any Conservative Club across Britain. She is wealthy; thanks to her investor husband, who indulges her – he gives her Stephen, he buys her the son she wants. In return she kills him by putting rat poison in his dinner – a scene re-used in ‘The Second Coming’ The passage which illuminates her character concerns the shopping expeditions she makes – buying designer clothes which she then deliberately damages, just so she can take them back to the shop, demand her money back and bully the staff there. She is the sort of women who could purchase a child and genuinely think that she could take back the child after years of sickness to exchange it for one that is healthy.
What Russell does effectively here, not just for Eva but for many of the other characters is to give them a history, a view into why they are the way they are and what brings them to the Quadrant – his character work in this is brilliant. He also shows how small moments in childhood can cause events to spiral out of control. The events of the story are set in motion by Eva being bullied – forced into shoplifting by a childhood nemesis, she is caught and later thinks that this has stopped her being able to adopt a child (it hasn’t). She hits her tormentor with a brick and is punched in the process, which may have contributed to her being unable to successfully give birth. There are moments when you genuinely feel sorry for Eva, the story of her grief and pain over her repeated miscarriages and her care for ‘Stephen’ her ‘adopted’ child and then it flips straight back and you realise just what a monster she is – what she is capable of and this is well before she encounters the n-form. There are echoes of her in the TV series, nothing quite as ‘real’ as her story, but non-the-less she is there in Blon fel Fotch in ‘Boomtown’ or Ms Foster in ‘Partners in Crime’. In some ways what happens to Eva is also similar to Miss Hartigan in ‘The Next Doctor’, not the abuse, but railing against men whilst becoming part of a monstrous technology, possessed of a will that will not allow that technology to subsume her.
Winnie Tyler is the opposite of Eva, but she shares an equally monstrous secret and is similar in that she is by turns magnificent, terrible and piteous. Winnie is a much more sympathetic figure than Eva, despite selling one of her children. She has also become an alcoholic, but that along with the evidence of self-harm on her arms is largely as a response to the guilt that she feels for selling Peter/Stephen. She has effectively been grieving for the loss of her child for many years. She also leaves the money untouched, not wanting her children contaminated by it – despite their poverty – she works instead stuffing envelopes. She is magnificent when trying to protect her children (Bev, Carl and Gabriel) and has lost a lot as result of the bargain she made with the ‘tall man’ one Christmas Eve – we see all of this through Bev’s eyes – but also her passed out next to a bottle. She has our sympathy, but not that of her former friends on the Quadrant who can’t forgive her for what she did that night. Her fate here is just horrible, having taken some of the cocaine that her eldest son Carl had bought to teach him a lesson – she transforms horribly along with him as the n-form activates.
The Twin Dilemma
The story is also the tale of twins – Gabriel Tyler and Peter/Stephen, separated after birth. Gabriel has a ‘glamour’ – a psychic ability to make others like him, other people see him differently – reflecting aspects of them – he literally leads a charmed life, despite growing up in the poverty of the Quadrant. Stephen, as Eva re-names the other twin we only see in hospital, he has been ill most of his life. In a reverse of nature/nurture – the child who lives in the rich household and has everything (including love it has to be said) fades slowly away, whilst the one in poverty and a household of alcohol dependancy and self-harm (but also love) thrives. In this case the two children are psychically connected, but Gabriel is inadvertently sucking the life out of Stephen. It is this ‘vampiric waveform’ that attracts the n-form and which it is designed to remove.
There is a third child here – quite horribly – a lithopaedlan – a calcified, stone fetus. This is a genuine, rare medical condition. Eva has a ‘stone child’ outside of her uterus in an ectopic pregnancy. This is a detail, which is really unnecessary here– it is quite horrible and I don’t really see the point – especially when it makes a ‘guest appearance’. The fate of all three children intersects at the ending. Each of them suffers a quite nasty, horrible fate – Russell is utterly merciless with them. All hope is extinguished.
Queer as Folk
The other interesting story thread – again really not a Doctor Who story but interesting anyway, is the story of Harry and David. Harry an older gay man, in the closet all of his life and wracked with guilt about his nocturnal activities in the cemetery – which is where the story starts, The Capper interrupting a liaison by erupting from his grave. David, in contrast, is young and out there and enjoying his life in the gay clubs of the city. They are brought together by Harry’s recently deceased wife – Sylvie – who is a rather magnificent presence here. She is another great Russell T Davies matriarchal figure – appearing to Harry, who is still grieving for loss, when he needs her and looking after him. Sometime in the past she invited David to sleep on their sofa when he had nowhere to live and he’s stayed ever since. Theirs is a story with a happy ending (God knows it needed one) – David gets some man-on-man action with Chris and both characters actually survive. The appendix to the book suggests that in amongst the UNIT investigation in the aftermath of the incident at the Quadrant that amongst David’s test results a potential cure for HIV is found. Their story is a chink of light amongst the grimness and is also interesting to see Russell writing about gay men, just before ‘Queer as Folk’.
Happy Endings?
And so to the ending. Russell talks of being liberated by the format of writing a novel – that he could write destruction on a grand scale- a whole city devastated, a massive train crashes and spectacle. There are no consequences that he has to deal with in the context of an on-going TV series and no budget constraints. The thing is, I quite like some of those constraints – many of them have made Doctor Who more interesting than big budget alternatives and to me the spectacle and destruction is just a distraction here from the main event – the resolution of the separated twins and two mothers. The N-form and the monstrous army of horrifically converted child prostitutes, cocaine addicts, TV Execs (!) – well it is just too much for me I’m afraid.
It is grim, sad and horrible and at times I think unintentionally funny. I’ll give you an example – as the monstrous Eva is coming to reclaim her ‘son’ – her new ‘Stephen’, she is bleeding, the blood dripping down her legs – it is from her unborn calcified child, lodged outside of her uterus, in the end it is ‘born’ and depicted in graphic detail. Now, I just think why – why is that there – it isn’t needed, it is so bad, so utterly grim and unnecessary that it actually made me laugh. There are lots of other examples of this – Mr Leather who runs the local prostitutes with his wife, celebrates selling the cocaine that evening by having sex with one of his girls – who is 14. They both take the cocaine and as the n-form activates, their heads split open and they are converted.
The body horror is really, really nasty – but child abuse – sorry not for me, you can broaden the scope of ‘Doctor Who’, you can take it to all sorts of different and interesting places, but there are some places where if you push it, it just breaks. This is one of them for me, it cannot cope with the extremes of real life – it can’t cover them in the detail or the seriousness that they require. You could write the Doctor into Srebrenica or the Rwandan civil war, or the killing fields of Pol Pot – it is possible to do that – but it is crass and insensitive and if that is your story, well it is probably best to find another medium for it, rather than bending this one horribly out of shape to accommodate it. Ask yourself what do the Doctor and his world add to those situations and in return what do they add to the Doctor’s world?
Overall, I just can’t escape the conclusion that this story would be better without the involvement of the Doctor and his companions and should just have been it’s own TV series. Roz and Chris – well I can’t tell you anything much about them. I don’t feel like I know them, what they are supposed to be about or why they are here – and I’ve read quite a few of their stories – including their introduction. If anyone knows – in a phrase often used on BBC Children’s shows (Russell’s old show ‘Why Don’t You’ is referenced in the book) – ‘answers on a postcard’. A shame Russell didn’t get to write for Benny – that could have been fantastic and she would have worked well in this I think. His take on the Seventh Doctor is interesting. The Quadrant completely throws him, he finds it difficult to breach the closed doors and get to the heart of the mystery. So this most manipulative of Doctor’s finds himself a bit lost in this world – almost as much as I do.
Anyway, my advice is to read ‘Damaged Goods’ for yourself – reach you own conclusions – you might feel very differently about it from me. If nothing else, it contains a cracking story and along with Russell’s other work it forms an interesting backdrop for the series when it came back – a taste of how it might have been brought back in the 90’s in a much darker, late night slot. It isn’t ‘Rose’ – it is very, very far from it. It is by turns absolutely brilliant and ludicrous, mature and adolescent – a work in progress. It is a story that very much fits the NA brief of ‘too broad and too deep‘ for TV, but for me it really should have been dialled back a bit and in my view required some editing. Which is why on the whole I prefer the Big Finish version of it, the impact isn’t lost, but it is more effectively stripped back to the core story – Eva and Winnie and the twins and provides some hope at the end. It is a more mature piece and far more to my taste, actually I like it a lot.
A Journal of Impossible Things 