It was surely only a matter of time – that being a commodity Doctor Who possesses in abundance – before he would get to encounter space zombies on his intergalactic travels. Thus in last week’s episode we saw Peter Capaldi putting the boot into a colony of the intergalactic undead and emerge with nary a ruffle of his big hair and long coat.
When you scan the week’s television schedules, certain keywords and phrases jump out at you to indicate something that must be seen or is best avoided. A code thus evolves inside you over many years to diminish disappointment and maximise satisfaction. And so when the word “zombie” is observed in proximity to the word “space” under the heading “Doctor Who”, you know you’re in for a wee treat. “Dystopian” is another of those words and is usually deployed alongside the word” “future” or “landscape”.
All of them combined mean that you set your remote control doofer to record so that you can watch the film later after several Bacardis. I’ve always found that anything dystopian becomes even bleaker and more intense when a quantum of salvadors have been shifted. It seems hardly worth saying here that words such as “cookery”, “bake” and “chef” elicit a more negative response from me, as do words like “Graham”, “Norton”, “Alan” and “Carr”.
Escape From New York, Rollerball and Blade Runner are my top three films set in a dystopian future against a bleak landscape. There are usually several common themes running through them: the sense that people’s moral compasses have all gone haywire; that there’s never going to be a happy ending – at least not in the classic sense – and that the human race has an endless capacity of dreaming up new ways of doing in their brothers and sisters. I especially liked that bit near the end of Escape From New York when Snake Plissken embeds a wooden club jaggy with nails into the head of yon big mustachioed wrestler.
We can enjoy bleak, dystopian films because they seem far distant to our own reality and that means there’s always time for us to get a grip well before the robots start twitching. It’s the dystopian present that we all need to worry about, however, and, disturbingly, there are manifestations of it beginning to seep into the present reality of life in Scotland.
One of these occurred last week and chilled me to the marrow. “One-third of parents scared of letting children walk to school,” declared the Herald. According to the charity Living Streets, 60% of parents are worried about speeding cars outside of school and a third are worried about overcrowding outside the school gates. Presumably, these parents are the ones who insist on driving their children right up to the school gates, thus contributing to the speeding and the overcrowding. It’s the equivalent of a working-class person protesting against inequality and poverty, then voting for the Tories.
The research produced by Living Streets comes at a time when a third of Scottish children leave school obese or overweight. If Doctor Who maintains its popularity into the 22nd century, one episode will surely feature him and his companion travelling back in time to early 21st-century Scotland and wondering why the schools are full of pint-size wombles. Obesity should only occur after an adulthood of slow drinking, fast food and no exercise; at least then it will have been earned. There’s no such excuse for children and, as such, I feel sorry for them. Imagine leaving school four stone overweight and you haven’t even had your first pint of lager: what a waste.
The relationship between children being ferried to school by indolent parents and levels of childhood obesity is obvious. There are also less obvious and potentially more sinister forces arising from the school run having been transformed into the school stampede. Rollerball, where teams of muscled hardmen skate round an arena trying to eviscerate each other with a spiked metal sphere, has nothing on the school run in the west of Scotland. Entire neighbourhoods lying in the vicinity of an educationally desirable school have become virtual no-go areas between the hours of 8.30am and 9.30am and then between 3.15pm and 4.15pm.
Pavements are black with parked Audi and BMW 4x4s, backed up bumper to bumper. Already, I’ve witnessed sporadic outbreaks of civil disorder amongst lycra-clad mums eager to make their 9.30 pilates. At one revered fee-paying establishment on Glasgow’s Southside, the school run begins even earlier and has become a parade signifying wealth and status. Parents gather like vultures scanning the surrounding pavements for any signs of economic distress. In these testing economic times of corporate mergers, even lawyers and chartered accountants can experience the chill of unexpected redundancy. Yesterday, Jessica was driving a tidy wee black BMW number; today, she’s downgraded to a saloon with the dreaded Volkswagen badge.
Within a few days, the invitation for Ruaridh to attend Torcuil’s 10th birthday weekend trekking in Patagonia has been withdrawn. Continued membership of the fund-raising committee for the new velodrome and glass-bottomed swimming complex is, of course, out of the question. The maths and history tutors have to go too, a development that will diminish Ruaridh and Torcuil’s educational chances as well as Mummy’s midnight treat on the days when Daddy is “working up in Aberdeen”, as they say.
A Scottish, middle-class childhood has now been rendered a joyless and sterile thing. Soon, a security detail will be sent to accompany a child to and from school. Playtimes will take place within the confines of a 10ft wall with an electrified, barbed-wire topping and armed guards will patrol the perimeter.
