Doctor Who

"This is a madhouse. It's all full of Arabs." -The Doctor.

Like, nine episodes before Toymaker. In the same season.

And his desk, and his chair, and his accent. And his name.

Like, ignoring the "Celestial" thing, I'm pretty sure he's referred to as "the Mandarin" at a few points.

...And, I mean. To bring up Talons, there's a point where Jago calls someone "The Celestial Chang".

There's some difficulty viewing it as coincedence. Just because the term isn't in use now doesn't mean it wasn't in use then. It kinda actually was sometimes.

I think the main difference is that a lot of those other instances aren't mainly racist caricatures. The Toymaker was a pretty blatant Fu Manchu archetype. Mavic Chen was just a guy. With, y'know, motives.

Taking away the racial coding wouldn't fix the Toymaker because he doesn't actually have a character otherwise.

I mean, there's similar issues with things as recent as The Blind Banker.

And I feel it'd be a lot simpler just to call it non-canon.

edited 21st Oct '14 12:10:47 PM by unnoun

Doesn't one serial have someone just casually drop the N-word at some point?

Yep. It's The Celestial Toymaker.

...

...well, I read the article.

Alas, and the story seemed like such a good idea too...

Has anyone ever attempted to try to redo "The Celestial Toymaker", without featuring the Toymaker?

I have the book.

It's a really nice book.

...I mean, god, I remember hating Toymaker as a child. I can't stand its good reputation.

Like, I'm not even saying that everyone involved in it was a racist person? But I can't stand the fact that people in fandom regard it as a classic.

My moral objections to things like Pertwee and Tennant's eras are actually fairly minor and mild in comparison.

I mean. This, basically.

...It's one of the issues I have with a lot of the received wisdom of fandom.

I mean, people hype up Tomb Of The Cybermen, when the main good bit most of fandom talks about is the one where they come out of the Tombs. And it has some non-white characters that are mostly stupid and untrustworthy.

...I mean, with The Enemy Of The World, it would probably have been better if Salamander was a white guy. That's a valid complaint. I mean, Troughton's accent was meant to be foreign, not English, but not seemingly Mexican either, and it doesn't get stereotypical anything. And his performance is nuanced. Not a bunch of stereotypes. I think there's a clear difference. Although I don't disagree with people that are upset by it, because I think they probably have a right to be.

And for me the worst thing is that there are people who think that the rat is the only thing wrong with Talons. People like Lawrence Miles and Steven Moffat. And, hell, Davies and Cornell.

...That Doctor Who and Race book has a lovely essay by Kate Orman about the racial issues in Talons. So that's nice.

edited 21st Oct '14 12:46:35 PM by unnoun

That's kind of what the dumb puzzles in the Five Doctors was?

I thought the good bit was where the Doctor talks to Victoria?

edited 21st Oct '14 12:44:03 PM by Bocaj

I'd say that's the good bit.

But it's not what most of the guide books say the good bit was.

I have issues with those guide books.

Yay 5/Nyssa!

edited 21st Oct '14 12:47:42 PM by unnoun

Tomb is littered with good bits.

Like diamonds in a dung heap.

I mean, equally, making Salamander a white guy would have reduced the international scope of the story, unless you found another character to make non-white.

Astrid being the obvious choice, and that would have been good. But making Salamander have a foreign accent (and Troughton plays him as shiftystani) also helps distinguish him from the Doctor. It's telling that the story was not hard to follow in reconstruction despite Troughton playing two roles. He does a very good job of distinguishing the parts early on, and the accent is part of how he does that.

See, that's the thing: Gough doesn't perform the Toymaker as though he's Chinese. He looks and sounds English. Nothing about his characterization suggest that he's Chinese. There's no accent (and I'm sorry, I've listened to this story and tried to detect the Chinese accent that Sandifer claims is there, and it just isn't. I don't know what he's talking about).

The Toymaker is a white guy wearing Chinese Mandarin robes. The clothes no more make him Chinese than Steven's cowboy outfit in the Gunfighters makes him an American. That's why I said if they had put Gough in a modern suit, not one person would look at him and say "that's a racist caricature". Because he isn't playing one.

Ask Donald Tosh. As one of the last surviving writers from that era, he's said that the Toymaker was never meant to be Chinese. He had it in mind that he was like the Monk, another of the Doctor's race, but that idea was lost in the rewrites.

Well, yes, but there are white cultures without British accents.

I couldn't tell it was supposed to be a Mexican accent. They could leave it ambiguous.

And really, the story has two non-white characters. There's not much of an international scope to begin with, by that metric.

edited 21st Oct '14 12:59:45 PM by Wackd

I mean, I find it interesting that Tosh's name was withdrawn from Toymaker at his own request.

...I heard the accent as a little girl. And every time I've seen or listened to it since then.

Which is admittedly not often, given I've always hated it, but.

edited 21st Oct '14 1:03:39 PM by unnoun

...it's probably also worth considering when Tosh said this.

Generally speaking you don't get invited back for a lot of DVDs and con appearances if you condemn one of your era's most popular stories as shockingly racist, I don't think.

(BBC should take a page out of Warner Bros' playbook, I think. "It was wrong then, and it's wrong now" and so forth.)

I mean, Tosh didn't write the novelization either.

And Gerry Davis had something of a habit of rewriting things under his tenure.

And Tosh didn't want his name in the credits. Which, I mean. Is sorta interesting.

And the novelization is a bit of a thing, given how for so long it was the main way to re-experience stories. And it's not like it was a Terrance Dicks novelization of a story he had nothing to do with. It was a novelization by someone actually involved with the original.

And the Toymaker definitely had the desk and the chair in the serial.

edited 21st Oct '14 1:08:59 PM by unnoun

There is the fact though that they specifically chose to put him in Mandarin robes.

They didn't put him in a suit or a cowboy hat or what have you.

A decision was made on the production side to put this character in chinese clothes.

edited 21st Oct '14 1:10:03 PM by Bocaj

Yeah. That.

...the Steven comparison doesn't even make sense, because the TARDIS crew dresses the way they do in The Gunfighters as not to be conspicuous. They want to blend in while experiencing the American old west.

While The Celestial Toymaker, if I remember correctly, takes place in a sodding white void. We're not talking about a guy trying to not draw attention to himself as he meanders about China here. We're talking about a guy who dresses as a stereotypical Chinese person as a personal fashion statement.

Also, I found a clip online. I'd say Michael Gough is trying to do a Chinese accent, he simply isn't very good at it, so you kind of have to listen closely.

edited 21st Oct '14 1:19:45 PM by Wackd

The robes should be accompanied by appropriate "ethnic" makeup and accent if the character is supposed to be Chinese, surely?

Go back to John Bennett. Look at him in "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" and then in "Talons of Weng-Chiang". He's even wearing a Mandarin robe as part of his stage act at one point. There's no denying that he's playing a Chinese man. He's got makeup, and he's affecting an accent, neither of which is true for Micheal Gough, who has neither makeup nor accent. To me, as I said before, he sounds the same in Celestial Toymaker as he does in Arc of Infinity.

I would expect something similar to John Bennet's "Talons" performance if Gough was meant to be playing a Chinese character.

I mean, just having the robes constitutes a conscious decision on somebody's part.

...I don't think we heard the same things then.

I mean. It's entirely possible Gough had a make-up allergy.

Actually, that costume change already makes the story a million times more interesting.

While I agree with some of your points unnoun, saying that the depiction of non-whites as stupid is racist is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. Is every single non-White character supposed to be some genius? That's absolutely ridiculous.

That's a false dichotomy if I've ever heard one. Intelligence is a spectrum, with options in-between genius and idiot.

It's like asking if you're rather a Chinese character walk around bare naked than wear what the Celestial Toymaker's wearing.

The problem isn't some non-white characters being stupid. The problem is all non-white characters being stupid.

At one point, unnoun literally said that the depiction of non-whites as unintelligent is racist.

No, she said the depiction of the Toymaker as stupid was racist. Not all not-white characters everywhere forever.

These were her exact words:

The character is a stereotypical depiction of the Chinese, and therefore his stupidity is easy to read as an indictment of the intelligence of Chinese people.

Also, unnoun, I would just like to take a moment to say that, while this in no way reflects on my feelings on you as a friend or as a decent human being, I hate the way you use "I mean" even when you're not actually clarifying a previous statement, because you've Got Me Doing It and now I'm constantly going through everything I write after I've hit "send" trying to edit a million instances of it out of my writing.

edited 21st Oct '14 3:31:29 PM by Wackd