Three Billy Goats Guff

What makes a troll? That's the internet type, not the mythical creature of Norwegian (probably - I can't be arsed checking, I've had a tooth out, my face hurts) origin.

I had always thought of a troll as someone who comes onto a forum solely to cause trouble, deliberately and perversely arguing for something essentially ridiculous and making stuff up to suit their mental argument. And all desigend to provoke a reaction.

As opposed - to get down to cases - to someone going on a web forum and arguing an unpopular line which just happens to be true.

To get down to actual specifics, I've been banned from the doctorwhoforum. In itself that's no big deal - I've been banned by better sites than that, I can tell you mate - and I can even understand why they banned me. After all, I was upsetting the kind of 'proper' Doctor Who authors which the forum relies on to give its indefinable cachet and I may well have been a bit rude about it (I don't deny that I can occasionally get so wrapped up in the argument - and am so used to the 'anything goes' nature of certain mailing lists - that I can slip into, well, mildly unpleasant sarcasm).

But what I was saying was the truth, and I was never what I would consider to be very rude, nor was I trying to provoke a reaction so much as getting irritated at what I saw as rather creepy behaviour.

Previously I'd been warned for the sin of saying Times Champion was rubbish (it is), that a particularly stupid poster appeared to be borderline special needs (he is) and for defending myself against a sneaky and smug personal attack by a sycophantic guffmonkey named Ben Adams (he is - a sycophantic guffmonkey, that is).

I should probably just have left when my post defending myself was removed by the forum Mods but clown boy's attacking me wasn't. I should certainly have left when a post I did asking what was so great about 'In Vision' was deleted along with various subsequent posts by other people asking why my non-objectionable post had been deleted also got deleted (goodness, all those deletions - it's like a particularly poor episode of New Who).

As it turns out I never got the chance to leave as I got banned for was for saying that Justin Richards doing four of the 10 books in the new multi-part Who series was just another example of the rank nepotism at work in the Who book world and a sign that the publishers could care less about quality. As that was actually me agreeing with a couple of other people who had said exactly the same thing earlier on, you'd think that would be OK, but within seconds the usual suspects appeared on the scene like particularly cringe-making vultures at a feast of arsiness. Lance (who I like as a writer and who, this trait aside, is funny, intelligent and knowledgeable about cool stuff) did his usual 'anyone who might one day commission me is perfect' schtick, and Peter Anghelides - check his bibliography and see how many non-Who plays, short stories and novel he's done, and then remember he's one of Justin 'I Commission Only my Mates' Richards oldest friends - came along, shuffling like Uncle Tom and twisting the facts into pretzels in an effort to make Richards and his little coterie of poor writers look less nepotistic.

Anyway, I thought I was reasonably polite - I scoffed a little at Lance's ridiculous claim that co-editorship of the schoolboy criticism which is the poorly mimeographed 'In Vision' series counts as professional non-fiction experience but I deleted a long post marking out exactly how Peter A had been disingenuous in order to defend his friend, on the grounds that defending your friends is an admirable thing.

But I still got banned for being rude and incapable of courteous behaviour, or some such.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I have very little time for most of the mods on OG, who are a shower of smug, self-congratulatory idiots, more interested in buttering up the very minor writers who post there than anything else, and so being banned by them is hardly a blow to my ego.

But someone I do like and respect a great deal did say to me later that I had been trolling a little and acting a 'bit wanky' and, basically, got what I deserved (he said the last bit nicer than that, but I knew what he meant). Other people mailed me to say that I wasn't trolling and didn't go far enough, and a couple of people I know less well agreed I had been at it, but still...it continues to bother me several days later that this one person thought I was trolling because he's an honest guy and obviously thought I was.

And I genuinely wasn't intending to do so.

Oh well, I'm sure I'll recover - I am, after all, hardly thin-skinned - but maybe I'll stay off all web fora for a while, just in case he was right and I was doing something more than just arguing my case.

For reference though, every writer except Richard Dungworth (who I don't know) involved in the Darksmith Legacy is a bad, bad writer and get commissioned far too much for no immediately obvious reason.

Idiocy on a Grand Scale (aka Helen Raynor is rubbish)

I've become a recent convert to the joys of half-wit watching on the web forum formerly known as Outpost Gallifrey, but now called (cleverly) doctorwhoforum.com.

It's full of high quality guff - from Chris McKeon telling everyone his charity book/ride on the late Craig Hinton's coat-tails, Time's Champion, is an official release because Justin Richards once told Craggles to write it, through Gary Russell claiming that he was excluded from the cool kids' New Adventures book club, all the way to someone called Marvin proving that the body can survive for ages after the removal of the brain.

Maddest (and in many ways saddest) of all however is a completely bonkers thread called 'The Helen Raynor Apology Thread', in which sundry OG posters supplicate themselves at the feet of Ms Raynor and apologise until their tongues bleed.

And the reason for the apology? Because Rusty - in his new collection of emails, notebook scribbles and illegible instructions to himself in bookie's biro on kebab wrapper ("what does that bit say? 'fuck Eccleston' is it?") - says she was crying her little eyes out when the bad freaks, sad geeks and barely pubescents twinks on OG said her Dalek two-parter wasn't very good.

Which it wasn't. There's no doubt about it. It was ineptly edited, poorly acted and badly directed for a start. Oh - and written as though someone had used a razor to cut up an already pretty crap script and then only kept the really rubbish bits. It's awful. Dreadful. Amateur. A total waste of time and energy for both those involved in making it and those unfortunate enough to sit through it. The fact Raynor (a) got paid for it and (b) got asked back to write more just sums up what a jobs for the boys no-taste arse Russell T Davies can be.

But hey - Raynor got paid good money for writing it, so she can at least use the cash to buy girly stuff like sexy underwear and the Mamma Mia DVD even while she sobs her tiny Princess Perfect heart out. And Davies is still fellated daily by assorted fanboys and girls in spite of the lazy pap he traditionally passes off as quality television every season end, so presumably he's delighted.

So why are the hand-wringing, personality-free, painfully right on and socially aware idiots who infest the Doctor Who world so keen to prostrate themselves in guilt and shame that they've set up a whole thread to say sorry?

Obviously, it's mainly in hopes Rusty will come back to OG and read the thread, remember the names of everyone who said sorry and therefore know, however briefly, who they are (or what they call themselves at least, given many posters preference for 'hilarious' pre-teen internet nicknames).

He might even mention thread originator Steve91 in passing in some future tome, acknowledging the fact that the 91st Steve on Outpost Gallifrey was the only person man enough to stand up and say 'SORRY HELEN!", even though he didn't personally say anything negative at all, has always has a lot of time for scripts by ladies ('or is it women? or people of femininity? OMG, it's the whole black/coloured Martha thing all over again!!! Forgive me Helen, forgive me!!!) and in any case wasn't even on OG that day because he was off walking a blind chinese lesbian's two legged dog round a local Halal butchers.

But other than that? What could motivate anyone to say something as dripping in saccharine piety/pompous moral condemnation as "No amount of after-the-fact rationalisation can change the emotional impact of first reading those insults." or "my little input is to say i have nothin against ms raynor, and i did enjoy her episodes for series 4 and her tw ep. but i was mean about her series 3 dalek eps. i still dont like those eps but i could have been less vocal about it - cringe"

It's because she's a girl, basically: a doe-eyed sweetheart of a girl who can't speak up for her little itsy bitsy self. She needs defending from the Big Bad (in this case spotty herberts who can quote whole chunks of Hitchhikers) by the forces of Good (in this case pious twerps who used to be OG Mods and who think a second not spent arse-kissing is second where a good pair of lips are going to waste).

How else to explain the lack of a 'Steven Greenhorn Apology Thread' or a 'Matt Jones Apology Thread'?

They're a shower of sexist swine over on that OG Forum, so they are...

Congratulations finally to one Grafty for this post which was easily the most interesting in the entire - as of just now - six page thread, and Yetaxa for pointing out that the original insult thread sounded a damn sight more entertaining.

Survivors Reborn?

I love Survivors. Along with Goodnight Sweetheart, it's the only genre show which I might watch instead of Doctor Who. I love the starkness and brutality of Nation's vision for the post-Death future in series 1, I love the often banal but sometimes lyrical farming stories of series 2, and I even love bits of series 3, at a point when Terrance Dudley had tried his ham-fisted best to make the entire series rubbish.

So I should in theory be over-joyed the BBC are bringing it back. But now that the euphoria has worn off, I'm more than a little bit worried.

First cause for concern: the Doctor Who revival experience

Take something which I treasure for its underlying themes and tropes as much as anything else, and drop all of the elements which made it worth watching. Next, wrap it up in brainless bright lights, chuck in a Mary Sue companion and throw it onto prime time.

So I worry that where Rusty dropped the idea of the heroic Doctor as a man of science who made sense out of the nonsensical, and replaced him with an idiot savant who more often than not needs saved by Rusty's prefered heroine, the young feisty female companion, so I'm concerned that the bleakness at the heart of the first two series of Survivors will be buffed up and brightened for modern viewers, and that post-Death Britain will follow the same brain-dead pattern as American series with similar settings.

For an example try watching a few episodes of the perfectly adequate, if fairly brainless, Jeremiah, which is packed to groaning with extras from the first Mad Max film and where every town has a curiously clean and well organised market where they trade for batteries and old transistor radios.

Second cause for concern: The Writer

Survivors is a series for grown-ups, but it's been put in the hands of Adrian Hodges, the brains behind Primeval, a series primarily noted for being full of shiny effects and pretty girls inexplicably in their underwear. Admittedly basing my views entirely on that show, he really doesn't do thoughtful at all well, and I simply can't imagine him doing justice to a series about the adult (note, not teenager or young adult) reaction to an apocalypse. As with Chris Chibnall and Torchwood, adult will be confused with sex obsessed and what we'll get is lots of scenes of hard 'n' nasty nookie because there's nothing else to do after the Death, man.

Third Cause for Concern: The America Perspective

Which in part also informs my belief that New Survivors will again ape New Who and be written with one and a half eyes on the American market. I fully expect guns and explosions and lots of Survivors with great figures and a penchant for walking about in vests looking all sweaty. And if the ratings still aren't great, I predict aliens who need to mate with humans to ensure the survival of their species will land at the start of series 2.

Final Cause for Concern: Happy, Shiny People

TV execs nowadays don't really approve of bleak or downbeat. It doesn't do well in focus groups of stoned students and bored housewives, nor does it sell well to advertisers. So expect every episode to be a self-contained feast of sanitised squalor with a suitably chirpy ending in which everything Turns Out All Right. Certainly don't expect anything like 'Law and Order'.

Actually all those moans basically boil down to the same thing - after New Who I no longer trust the BBC to stay true to the spirit of any show they relaunch. Scrabbling after as broad a demographic as possible as defence in their battle to keep the license fee, combined with a deep desire to make any new series as US-friendly as they can manage, means that quality comes a distant second to saleability. Anything which is different or which could ever be seen as cause for offense to anyone must be jettisoned in favour of the innocuous but glittery.

And Survivors, in its original incarnation, is as different as can be from the BBC's current anodyne fayre.