Saturday 23 November 2013

My Doctor Who memory: the Daleks in Trafalgar Square

5 December 1964. The Doctor was William Hartnell, and this was only the second ever Dalek story, the one in which the Daleks invade a near-future Earth. I was five, nearly six, and I was just discovering Doctor Who and experiencing that peculiar ambivalence familiar to subsequent generations of children: that of it's being terrifying, beyond anything else in our televisual experience - but also entirely compelling. The story is notable in the overall Who narrative, because it's the one in which his grand-daughter Susan stays behind to marry her nice resistance fighter and work for the post-war reconstruction of Earth. But for me it was memorable, in fact burned itself into my memory, because it showed the Daleks in a place which I knew intimately.

We didn't live in London, but we often drove there, and my father taught me the names of the landmarks: Hammersmith Bridge, Piccadilly Circus with its neon lights and statue of Eros, and Trafalgar Square with its stone lions and Nelson's Column. Practising my geography, I used them to mark the stages of our journeys, counting them off and naming them as we passed. They were not only part of London, they were part of my life.

So I'm watching Doctor Who, and there's this bit where Barbara, who's fallen in with a group of resistance fighters, is helping this old and wheelchair-bound hero of the conflict escape, because the Daleks are closing in on their location. In a long filmed sequence, with another woman of the resistance, they race along the Victoria Embankment, and then have to hide as a Dalek convey passes over Westminster Bridge. When the coast is clear, they move on quickly to Trafalgar Square - but the Daleks have got there first. The camera view starts at the top of Nelson's Column, then pans down to the stone lions, revealing the Daleks gathering there. The effect was breath-taking and astonishing for me; the Daleks were no longer just on television: they had invaded my life.<1>


(The Victorian Embankment / Trafalgar Square sequence begins at timecode 5:03)

Many years later, watching the episode on DVD, I had a flash of association with an image which I only got to know as an adult: the famous newsreel footage of the Nazi army marching into Paris past the Arc de Triomphe. The sense of violation, of a deeply familiar landmark being desecrated by something which should absolutely not be there, was just the same. I was also aware of how many associations there must quite deliberately have been in that episode when originally shown, for grown-ups who remembered the Second World War and knew about Nazi-occupied Europe: the intimidation, the resistance, the labour camps, and the occupied people pressed into service as collaborators: the humans who had been turned into Robomen.<2> The Doctor himself most obviously resembled an Eastern European refugee: cultured yet poor, wandering far from his native land, the generation between himself and his grand-daughter conspicuous by its absence, presumably due to war or armed conflict.



But back in 1964, my dear mother indulged my obsession. She always decorated our (home-made) Christmas cake with style and imagination, and so that year our Christmas cake featured the Daleks in Trafalgar Square. Nelson's Column was a stick of rock, with the plastic lions from my Noah's Ark around its base and Noah himself standing in for Nelson. The Daleks themselves were made of round chocolate biscuits in layers, with smarties on their outsides. It was a good end to a fantastic story. The Daleks might have conquered the Earth, but we ate them for Christmas.

Notes

<1> This story was the first in Dr Who to use extensive location filming - to great effect. The image of the Daleks on Westminster Bridge is well-known because of a publicity still (not reflecting the shots used in the actual episode), which was later imitated on a Radio Times cover in 2005 (image 14) and the 50th anniversary programmes.
<2> The World War 2 and Nazi occupation references are discussed in the commentary on the BBC Dr Who website, and in the Wikipedia entry.

Wednesday 6 November 2013

The secret of learning design - on a T-shirt

This excellent T-shirt is produced by the same designers who produced the much-circulated graphics on How to Care for Introverts / Extroverts.

As soon as I saw the design, I forwarded the link to a friend who finds some of her work colleagues need to have the same things explained to them repeatedly, or think that if they're sent on a training course they'll magically be able to do their job. She loved the design, as I knew she would.

But it later occurred to me that this T-shirt slogan also goes to the heart of learning design, along the same lines as my previous effort to summarise everything one needs to know about it in two principles. What it says is that you can explain as much as you like, and produce texts and videos and websites, and none of it guarantees anything. Or as I put it in my previous post: people learn because of what they do, not what you do.

Of course, if you're a teacher, this doesn't mean that you can just explain things and leave the rest up to the learner. If you're going to take your responsibility seriously, and if you have learners who you can't be sure will be able to take charge of their own learning, then you need to prompt them into doing things which will enable them to learn from your explanations. It's in that interaction that the magic happens, which is why learning design is a creative craft. As the T-shirt reminds us, the learning begins when the explanation ends: when the teacher stops talking and the learner becomes active.

Seen and heard: October 2013

Queen of Heaven - concert by The Sixteen, mainly Palestrina plus beautiful comparison-contracts with the contemporary James Macmillan. Fantastic to hear this top class choir close to home, now that they've added Milton Keynes City Church to their annual choral pilgrimage.

A Night in Vienna - concert by Milton Keynes City Orchestra, Strausses, Lehar and so on. Great fun, with conductor Hilary Davan Wetton in full audience-pleasing mode, though I'm not sure how many of the large youth party from Milton Keynes College really enjoyed it.

The Big Red Bath - a kid's theatre trip to The Stables for our grand-daughter aged 6. I didn't seen how a simple picture book about bathtime could make a stage show, but the Full House theatre company did it: with three actors taking all the parts, atmospheric music, and lots of mime and dance. As one of the Stables staff commented, not one child asked to go to the toilet during the show: a strong indicator of quality.

The Russia House - 1990 film with Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, watched again on video: an anniversary present from my wife. It's one of our favourites: a John Le Carré novel in a cracking adaptation by Tom Stoppard, heartfelt and powerful. Best line: "these days you have to think like a hero just to behave like a merely decent human being."

22 Reasons for the Bedroom Tax - gently satirical poem by Carol Ann Duffy, riffing on the ministerial statement about the difficulties encountered with the badger cull (that "the badgers had moved the goalposts"). Also a witty commentary on the use of clichéd metaphor in public life.

Get Your Inbox to Zero - training course provided by ThinkProductive. I'm fairly cynical about the value of most training, but this fell into small fraction of courses I've experienced which was actually good and useful. It was basically an application of the well-respected David Allen "Getting Things Done" approach, and by the end of the day I had indeed reduced my email Inbox to zero, from a starting point of nearly 300. More to the point, it's still at zero, or at least I get it to zero by the end of each day.

Masters of Sex - Channel 4's intelligent and period-detail-rich dramatisation of the collaboration between Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson in their ground-breaking 1950s study of human sexual response. Michael Sheen is especially good as Masters: since it's presumably not known what he was actually thinking and feeling as their relationship took its twists and turns, this is made into a character trait: you feel that he's a stranger to himself and doesn't really know his own thoughts and feelings.

Inspector Montalbano - new series on BBC4. So The Young Montalbano was a gap-filler (very good gap-filler) before the return of the original. Good to be back in Vigata, though a bit sad to see how much older everyone is now - especially Augello.

New Directions in Learning and Teaching - my Faculty's annual mini-conference / workshop, with particularly memorable presentations on peer assessment, student experience of online materials, and the strategic use of discussion forums.

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective - Japanese cartoon-style point-and-click adventure game. The character whom you play is dead and the murder he's investigating is his own, using his abilities to move physical objects poltergeist style, travel along phone lines, and wind back time to four minutes before someone else's death in order to prevent it taking place. Funny and charming, with excellent animation (especially the dancing police inspector); no voice acting, but the story cracks along just fine through speech balloons. Lots of happy hours here.