Hi Luca, I'm going to hand over the keyboard for a moment for a guest post from my husband, who has a lot of unusual interests I love. The most niche of his interests is writing long analytical essays on Cybermen - particularly, on audio drama episodes containing Cybermen. Very few people write about this, and I always read his essays with great interest. I personally think all this niche stuff is very cool and don't think it needs to be any cause for embarrassment - why should anyone feel bad about having non-mainstream interests? Handing you over to Brett now.
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Hello, I'm Brett! To start with, try being a bloke in Australia and not being interested in sport (esp. "footy") or cars. That limits your conversation with most other blokes to pretty much zero. Author William Gibson often writes about characters with deep niche interests, because I assume he himself has deep niche interests.
Pattern Recognition features characters who are obsessed with mystery online footage; other characters who obsessively collect and catalogue antique mechanical calculators, or TRS-80s (an old 80s computer from the UK). Deep niche people are cool.
Okay, I think we all have a personal mythology. In the old days it was Thor, or Osiris, or whatever your culture was. These days, we don't have a pantheon, we have
media. So
my mythology, the stories about Gods and Heroes and Tricksters and Monsters and Mighty Deeds, is basically the BBC TV series
Doctor Who I watched growing up
.
The Daleks (above) are probably the best known adversaries of the Doctor and his friends, with a distinctive voice and design, and being essentially hysterical xenophobic genocidal Nazis in tin-cans, they have a certain magnetic appeal. But my imagination was captured by the Cybermen ...
To start with, visually, they're
amazing. They probably look like robots, and look a bit funny with their "ear handles". But its
genius. The design of the Cybermen has changed radically over the years, but the silhouette on pretty much any version of the Cybermen is unmistakable.
This is the first model from 1965! They are deeply weird looking. AND theY SPeaK wiTH A verY STRanGE intONAtION.
And here's how they evolved:
Everything from the last one (1969 or so) has been variations on that. They speak differently too. Some talk in a buzzy electronic tone; some speak a bit like Lord Vader.
So what are they? They're an extrapolation of medical science, the 60s fear of the new science of "spare part surgery" -- pacemakers, artificial limbs, etc. These are people who have replaced almost all of their bodies with machine parts, and then neurosurgically altered their brains to remove all their emotion as well. And they think that everyone should be like them.
So that's niche, kind of. But I'm even more niche than that. There's a company called Big Finish that makes audio drama of Doctor Who, and because Cybermen are a popular monster, and are vocally distinct (important in audio drama), they've done stories with them. And because they're a spin-off media company, producing these when nobody really cared, they could do some amazing things.
You see, the problem was no matter how much I liked the concept, and the design, the stories they were in that we had access to were mostly pretty awful. So that disappointed me greatly. But Big Finish could do more modern stories, with more complex and adult ideas and situations, and they really fulfilled the
potential of the Cybermen. And I'm fascinated enough to want to unpick those stories and see what makes them work, to look at the themes and ideas.
I'll quote from one of my essays here, slightly edited ...
... And Yvonne’s conversion is one of the most tragic and heartbreaking scenes in any Doctor Who story. To start with, she’s introduced sympathetically in Episode 1 as part of a normal family. Her Dad clearly loves her, and she argues with Frank, her younger brother. When Yvonne and Nyssa meet, the become friends quickly. She also has a serious lung disease that makes her cough and require continual medication. Sisterman Constant gives a rueful, pitying report of her and determines she’s a candidate for being a surface-worker. In Episode 2 she’s made even more vulnerable as, still coughing, she reports for duty, and has her clothes taken away. She’s naked but eager to get her “uniform” (i.e. what she thinks a Cyberman is). Doctorman Allan mocks her and tells her authoritatively to stand back in line. When the conversion happens, she’s told by an attending Cyberman that she will be "the future". We hear her cries for help, her whimpers, and then the surgical power tools. And then something extraordinary happens: the power goes out. The surgery is complete, but the mental processing is not quite finished, and Cyber-Yvonne wanders away.
She encounters the Doctor and Dodd, the black-market spare parts dealer, who with distaste describes her as “bloody horrible.” In response she says, in Nicholas Briggs’ Cybervoice, in half childlike wonder, half puzzled dismay, “Am I horrible?”
My God. [Another character] begging for death is a pale imitation of this newborn creature, the remnant of a character we sympathise with, questioning its own appearance and identity.
... Dodd further observes that “it stinks of antiseptic,” and the Doctor responds that they’ve always smelled like that. Who doesn’t associate antiseptic with hospitals, treatment rooms, surgery, sickness and pain? Robert Holmes wrote the line that “there’s nothing quite so evocative as one’s sense of smell,” and Platt here uses the principle to devastating effect. It’s a fantastic detail, again linking Cybermen with their medical background, and enriching our experience of the television series. Why isn’t this mentioned again in any Cyberman story?
I suspect it’s the later scene of Cyber-Yvonne returning home is what Russell T Davies is talking about when he praises the story. Dad and Frank Hartley don’t understand that the monster that bashes their door down and invades their home is their daughter, their sister, catastrophically transformed.
Nicholas Briggs is called to do a range of voices for this story: the flat, halting voice of the police, the weird intonations of the Cybermen, the deeper, authoritative voice of Cybercommander Zheng, the buzzy Committee/Cyberplanner. But nowhere does he turn in a more astonishing performance than when he voices Cyber-Yvonne. She mewls like a newborn, gurgles and whimpers softly; a strange sound that with the sound processing occasionally resembles the tones of a modem. She screams as her family try to take the “mask” off, and you hear her crying afterwards. And it’s Nicholas Briggs sitting at a microphone reading Platt’s lines and breaking your heart. Finally, the power returns and her programming completes automatically and she cries out electronically for Frank and Dad, before her personality is subsumed and wiped away for ever.
... Marc Platt and the 5th Doctor treat the Cybermen primarily as victims, and Peter Davison delivers a compelling performance brimming with anger on their behalf. The Cybermen are pejoratively referred to as “tinned leftovers,” “animated corpses,” “walking wounded,” “road accidents,” and most often as simply “horrible.” The Cybermen have never been treated sympathetically before. These are people who used to have identities and feelings, not just "The Monster of the Week"
There.
Essays posted to a niche forum about a monster in a niche spin-off in an even more niche media (audio drama) of a cult TV series.
Nobody I know to speak to has any interest in any of that, or even remembers what the Cybermen were if they watched the program at all.
But writing about things helps me to understand them, and re-examine them, and see them with news eyes, and enjoy them in a deeper way. I post these to a Doctor Who forum, but even there, among people who know what I'm talking about, they're not well read much less commented on
But it's what I do. Good writing practice. Helps keep me sane, even though sometimes you do feel a bit lonely.
The scene/s (audio only) I refer to can be heard here:
