Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 5h

Thinking about some of the absolute piss people my age used to drink to get plastered when we were students, I learned of the existence of this singer.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond...

Diamond White - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 10h

Are you feeling any urge to find a new social media platform, Jonn?

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 13h

Share a four-word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand:

"Just a light proofread."

Spinky’s Mama @spinkysmama.bsky.social · 13h

In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand.

“Specific and limited way” (advisory)

“Dangerous Dogs Act 1991” (drafting)

Martin Nutbeem @martinnutbeem.bsky.social · 14h

In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand.

"I've bought this resource..."

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 14h

There are albums that still cause me a weird sense of dislocation when they don't finish abruptly mid-song 45 minutes in.

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 1d

Always weird when someone posts tourist pics of a city you know well, marvelling at the splendour of it all while your jaded brain goes, "Well, yes. So?" I can only imagine what it must be like living in, say, Rome or Venice.

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Obverse Books @obversebooks.co.uk · 1d

For the first time in paperback, the Periodic Adventures of Senor 105!

3 novellas to a volume, 9 novellas in total, with books by @purserhallard.com, @stuartdouglas.com, @signorfurioso.bsky.social, @selinalock.bsky.social, 105 creator Cody Schell and others!

obversebooks.co.uk/product-cate...

Senor 105 – Obverse Books

obversebooks.co.uk

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The Black Archive @blackarchive.co.uk · 1d

Out now in paperback, ebook and the usual combo deal - THE MYSTERIOUS PLANET, Black Archive #79, written by Jez Strickley!

A much under-rated story and Bob Holmes' last full script, MP is packed with duality - and for once, it's not just his dodgy double acts!

obversebooks.co.uk/product/79-t...

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 1d

Maybe we should all just not repost videos for a while.

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 1d

Speaking of colonialism in Doctor Who: "The planet that took me in, they were kind of posh. They'd use titles like the Doctor, or the Bishop, or the Rani, or the Conquistador." This line has to have been written to reflect Gatwa's experience as a refugee in Britain, surely?

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 1d

Thank you!

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 1d

Maybe we should all just not repost videos for a while.

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · Nov 14

Since new followers are arriving literally in their dozens, here's a quick rundown of my books and why, if you're interested in the stuff I post here, you might like to read them. Or vice versa.
Links are to my website, where there are links to buy from various sources.

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Jane @localnotail.bsky.social · 1d

Really interesting thread about Dr Who's Peter Davison's ethnic heritage, thank you.

Went to look and there are some photos in his autobiography to illustrate this.

nwhyte.livejournal.com/3279791.html

Cover of autobiography is a thoughtful smiling PETER DAVISON

IS THERE LIFE OUTSIDE THE BOX?

AN ACTOR DESPAIRS

3 photos of Peter Davison's father's family illustrating his black African heritage

Left: (younger woman standing smiling next to a seated older woman also smiling) My Auntie Olga with Granny Louise in British Guiana, 1937.

Below: My parents' wedding day, April 1947.

Left: (man at piano) My father about to perform - this got him many invitations to Sunday lunches.

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 2d

It occurs to me that the Doctor's polyethnic identity in recent times recontextualises Peter Davison's casting in quite an interesting way.
(For context, although you'd be unlikely to guess it by looking at him, Davison's paternal family is Guyanese. He has close relatives who are visibly Black.)

Peter Davison, a fair-skinned blond man, as the fifth Doctor, circa 1982.

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Spinky’s Mama @spinkysmama.bsky.social · 2d

Great thread. I can add Peter Davison writing about his father:

Extract from Is There Life Outside The Box? An Actor Despairs
Autobiography by Peter Davison

I more like him than I cared to admit while he was alive. I stand like he did, sit like he did, I look at my hands and see his, I look in the mirror and see his features, even though our colouring was so completely different. While I longed to look more like him, I realise I turned out as perfectly as he could have wished.
Here was a man from the Caribbean who wanted nothing more than to be accepted as British, who had a son who had made a name for himself playing the typical Eng-lishman.

Extract from Is There Life Outside The Box? An Actor Despairs
Autobiography by Peter Davison

But of course it did matter. What to us was a taste of the exotic was, to my father a bothersome distraction in his quest to be accepted as an exemplary British citizen.
The fact that his only son was born with blond hair and blue eyes, courtesy of inheriting my mother's dominant Caucasian genes, unlike my sisters, made the transition complete. Over the years however, his West Indian heritage became more than a distraction, and while we never knew of it until later, there's no doubt he suffered discrimination and rejection at the hands of Mother England that he loved. When Enoch Powell gave his 'Rivers of Blood' speech and my father had to stand in line and register as an alien, having been eventually accepted by my mother's extended family and friends, probably did nothing to soften his feelings.

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Horace Dorrington @mrtrellis.bsky.social · 2d

Note also the companions. Tegan is a white settler colonialist. Nyssa is the sole survivor of a dead empire. And Adric along with every other Alzarian is literally an indigene 'passing for white.'

All of which is a coincidence but a really nice one.

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Horace Dorrington @mrtrellis.bsky.social · 2d

And Snakedance, in which a decaying colonial empire into which the previous two Doctors would have breezed treats this incarnation as a scaremongering fool with dodgy indigenous sympathies.

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 2d

I'm not going anywhere else with this particularly, but it's worth bearing in mind when rewatching these stories.

(I refuse to tie this in with the Master, the Doctor's opposite, greying-up as an Orientalist stereotype in Time-Flight, because it would just make the above sound silly.)

Anthony Ainley as the Master, impersonating a pantomime eastern magician called Kalid, in Time-Flight (1982). As well as a more villainous than usual moustache and exotic robes, his "disguise" involves grey clay slathered over his face and a bald head. No, I have no idea, sorry.

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 2d

To some extent this is a retrospectively imposed reading, of course -- the producer, directors and scriptwriters were all assuming Davison was a default white man, and making the programme accordingly -- but the actor knew. That puts a degree of self-awareness in the overall creative collaboration.

The Doctor, and Nerys Hughes as Todd, patronising Lee Comes as the Trickster, one of the Kinda.

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 2d

The characters around him often make assumptions about the Doctor's sympathies in stories like this. These expectations are usually confounded (the stories are broadly against colonialism, though they're not always very good at it), but this context could give those moments extra resonance.

The fifth Doctor sitting in a deck chair, with cricket bat and ball, looking very civilised.

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 2d

In Black Orchid particularly, far from being in his element with the 1920s aristocrats, the Doctor would be just as much an outsider as the Native American, Latoni, if only they knew. In a story about the corruption of empire, where everyone's hiding something behind a facade, the hero is too.

The fifth Doctor in Black Orchid (1982), preparing for a spot of cricket with Lord Cranleigh.

Dittar Latoni, an Amazonian native American character, in Black Orchid. He is played by an actor called Ahmed Khalil, suggesting that somebody at the BBC has been confused by the use of the word "Indian".

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 2d

There's a shedload of colonialism in Davison's early stories. Aliens who've captured humans from historical cultures and make them eternally reenact their cultural rituals. Human colonists try to civilise a tribal culture that long ago outgrew its vastly sophisticated technologies.

Ilario Bisi-Pedro as Kurkutji, an Indigenous Australian, and Burt Kwouk as Lin Futu, a Chinese mandarin, in Four to Doomsday (1982).

Simon Rouse as Hindle, addressing two of the tribal Kinda who he's dressed like him in tropical fatigues and pith helmets, in Kinda (1982).

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 2d

But now that the Doctor has been Black, we can read his incarnation with this knowledge as a mixed-race (or, in some sense, partially Black) man passing as white, which potentially gives the cricket obsession and the Edwardian costume a very different significance.

Ncuti Gatwa, a Black man, as the 15th Doctor, circa 2023.

Jo Martin, a Black woman, as the Fugitive Doctor, circa 2020.

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 2d

In 1981, Davison was a mixed-race actor who had the necessary looks to pass as white. His heritage was never a notable factor in his casting as the Doctor, as it undoubtedly would have been if he'd inherited a darker skin.

Peter Davison being interviewed on the BBC magazine programme Pebble Mill at One in 1980.

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Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 2d

It occurs to me that the Doctor's polyethnic identity in recent times recontextualises Peter Davison's casting in quite an interesting way.
(For context, although you'd be unlikely to guess it by looking at him, Davison's paternal family is Guyanese. He has close relatives who are visibly Black.)

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