Doctor Whom or ET Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Parodication (2 page)

Very hard to concentrate on the job in hand, I can tell you.

The converse is also true. The engine-room of the TARDY contains Matter-Dolorosa Spacetime Converter Generators, vast machines that wrench the very sub-material of space and time about itself, plaiting great ropes of superstring into cat’s-cradles shapes. These are the largest and most powerful motors in the cosmos.

The engine room is the size and shape of a small cigar box.

The TARDY was designed with enormous cargo-holds, such that the Dr could transport millions of metric tonnes of cargo from world to world, should he need so to do. But, although the design was faithfully followed the fact remains that, stepping through the door of the device, you discover that the cargo holds on the inside are the exact size and dimensions of the ashtray on the Ford Cortina Mark III.

The control room presented a similar dilemma. It was designed to be spacious, with a large viewscreen and many padded and swivelly chairs, arranged carefully on a split-level effect, with various complicated-looking consoles and podiums between them. But when he took possession of his craft the Dr discovered that the bridge was the size of a glove-compartment. Luckily the design for the bridge had also included a glove compartment, which (stepping inside the TARDY) turned out to be the size of a middle-sized TV studio. The Dr had cleared it out: throwing away the half-eaten packet of Werther’s Originals, the single left-hand glove, a one-inch-to-alight-year galactic road atlas with the cover missing and the page for ‘Earth’s solar system’ all creased and scuffy, the half a dozen paperclips and the old biro with the ink clotted at the wrong end. He had then been able to reroute the control surfaces to a panel in the new room. He took to calling this space ‘the bridge’, but it was really the glove-compartment.

But this peculiar disrelation between inside and outside was not the only strange feature of the TARDY.

One feature of the machine was that it possessed a capability to disguise itself automatically. Unfortunately this ‘Disguise Mutation Chip’ functioned perfectly. This was a terrible shame. It would have been much better had it broken down, or malfunctioned in some way. But we had no such luck.

You see, the Dr’s TARDY took the shape of a police phone box. That was its disguise, which enabled it to blend in on any world. All Time Gentlemen were given TARDIES, and all of them were configured with some sort of police-based disguise chip, because every civilisation in the galaxy has a police force. But I have to say, if I’d been the Dr, taking charge of my TARDY for the first time, I would have flipped open the panel in the central control module and I would have smashed the Disguise Mutation Chip with the heel of my fancy boot. Or with a hammer. Or the head of my nearest assistant. Anything to hand.

Do you ask why? I’ll tell you why.

The Disguise Mutation Chip automatically changed the outward appearance of the TARDY to blend in with its environment. Imagine a different TARDY, one operated by a notional Time Gentleman, and programmed to look like a police car. It might land in London in the 1960s as a panda car; and in London in the 2960s as a Police All Nodes Driving AcceleraTron. Blending-in, you see.

All well and good -
if
your TARDY is configured to look like a police car. Or a police station. But the Dr’s TARDY took the shape of a police
phone box
. It was a nightmare.

Oh, if we landed in the London of the late 1950s then things were fine. We would materialise ourselves on the corner of a foggy street looking exactly like a tall blue cubicle with POLICE at the top. Well and dandy. But let’s say we were happened to materialise in London in - let’s say, for the sake of argument - 2010. Nobody used
phone boxes
in that time-period any more, of course; mobile phone technology had rendered them obsolete. To blend in, the TARDY’s software would automatically give us the appearance of a small Nokia seven-three-fourteen, the one with the blue screen and caller ident, the size of a small pack of cards.

Have you ever tried to clamber
out
of a small mobile phone? Of course you haven’t. That’s a stupid question. Well, I have: and let me tell you: even with the flip-back top it is very far from being easy.

Once the Dr landed the TARDY on a planet in the Nibbler Nebula, a place where the local inhabitants had not advanced beyond the equivalent of our stone age. Their rudimentary police force communicated amongst itself by yelling. Accordingly our Disguise Mutation Chip manifested us as a six-foot shouty man. We had to climb out through his mouth - awkward. And messy too. I came out first, squeezing myself up the gullet and past the big rubbery tongue and slobbery lips: I fell six feet to the stony soil, bruising my shoulder. I picked myself up and did my best to wipe the saliva from my face and body, as Linn followed, and finally the Dr himself. After a great deal of effort, and a good deal of saying
yuk
and
euw
we were all outside, and about to leave, when the Dr cursed. ‘I have forgotten my Moronic Screwdriver! Left it inside the TARDY!’

Linn and I both stared at one another. For several minutes nothing happened, except for the moaning of a vast and distant wind dragging itself across the horizon-spanning stony desert.

‘Well,’ I prompted. ‘Do you want to pop back inside and get it?’

The Dr looked at the TARDY. Its Disguise Mutation Chip had given it the look of a man not unlike a young Brian Blessed. The door was still open. The Dr looked at me. ‘You don’t fancy just, er,
popping
back inside for me, do you?’

‘Not I,’ I said.

‘Well,’ said the Dr, putting his hand on the TARDY’S chin and snapping it upwards to shut the door. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll need it.’

And so we went off without the Moronic Screwdriver. It was alright in the end, because we didn’t need it; but you take my point. It’s not convenient.

On another occasion we landed in eighteenth-century England, and the TARDY took the form of a large semaphore flag: oak pole and a red-triangular pennant. On the distant World of Racrd it took the form of a carrier pigeon. On more than one occasion (I repeat, for the record: on
more
than one occasion) we landed in cultures so technologically sophisticated that police communication was affected by microscopic nano-technological prostheses. On these occasions the Dr would open the TARDY door from the inside just fine; but the attempt to step through, or even to put one’s little finger through, proved perfectly impossible.

‘Righty-tighty,’ the Dr would say, on these occasions. ‘Well, I didn’t really want to visit this world and this timeframe anyway.’ And he’d fiddle with the control knobs and away we’d go.

There were whole swathes of space and time we never visited.

The Dr (the advertisement said) happened to be in my area and was recruiting. I went through his usual channels, and was given a time for my interview.

This took place in a spaceship, a marvellous device. It was called the TARDY, because its temporal engines slip it out of synch with Standard Time, disengaging itself, becoming in a sense cosmically
delayed
. It flips back along the temporal dimension (if the destination is in the future, then the TARDY loops right the way round the whole of spacetime, over the top and back in. It takes less time than you might think).

I stepped through the door. The Dr and a young woman were sitting behind a table. It was one of those tables with fold-out metal tubing for legs.

The Dr was dressed in a strange collection of velvet jacket, moleskin trousers, black winklepinker boots, a waistcoat, a silk tie with the design of a rectangular blue grid upon it. He had a big woolly scarf, and was wearing a leather overjacket. He looked a power of odd, to be honest. The young lady was dressed more soberly. And attractively.

‘Hello,’ said the Dr, peering at his notes and not looking at me. ‘Please take a seat.’ There was a rather rickety-looking chair sitting in the middle of the room: four aluminium poles, a small square of red plastic upholstery and a scuffed oval-shaped seat. I sat on this gingerly.

The woman smiled at me, which I took to be an encouraging sign. The Dr, however, seemed to be spending an awfully long time going through my résumé.

‘Right,’ he said, eventually. Finally he looked up and met my eye. ‘I am the Dr and this is Linnaeus Trout. Named for the great Linnaeus, who did such sterling work establishing categories, rules and restrictive definitions.’

This meant nothing to me. ‘Right,’ I said, a little nervously.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said.

‘So—Mr—
Tailor
, is it?’

‘That’s right. Prose Tailor.’

‘I wasn’t sure,’ the Dr said, ‘if that was your name, or your job description?’

‘It’s both,’ I explained. ‘On my world it is our jobs that give us our names.’

‘I see. So if, let us say, your work were syringing out the build-up of wax from the ears of cataleptic pigs, then your name would be—?’

‘Please forgive the Doctor his levity,’ said the woman, speaking in a well-modulated and pleasant voice. ‘Why don’t we start the interview with you telling us why you want the job?’

‘I don’t know really,’ I said, rubbing my right knee with my right hand. ‘I suppose I’m ready for a change. A career change. I’ve been a Prose Tailor now for seven years, and I’ve got the feeling I’m going nowhere. I’m ready for the change and the, um, exciting challenges of a new position.’

I paused. I don’t mind admitting I was nervous. I’ve never handled job interviews very well. I rubbed my right knee with my right hand again. Then I rubbed my left knee with my left hand for a bit. Then (I’m not sure why, except that I was terribly nervous) I rubbed both my knees with both my hands simultaneously. This produced a slightly squeaky noise, and for some reason I rubbed both my knees again, replicating the squeaky noise and satisfying myself that it had not been some random noise that happened to coincide with my knee-rubbing activity. I looked up. The two people behind the desk were looking at me askance. Or if not exactly quite
askance
, then at least in a way that was far from being fully skance. This, naturally, made me more nervous.

I folded my arms. But then I thought that folded arms might give me a standoffish look, so I unfolded them again. I found myself wishing that I had a desk, like my interviewers, upon which to rest my arms in a casual and easygoing manner. I held my arms, elbows bent, a little away from my sides. But that was no good.

‘Mr Tailor,’ said the Dr, leaning forward a little. ‘This is a job that will involve a great deal of travelling through space and time. Tell me: what experience of time travel will you bring to the position?’

I decided then that the best thing to do was let my arms hang straight down by my sides. But no sooner had I let them droop than it occurred to me that this might look rather monkey-like. I didn’t want them to think me too simian. Why should they give the job to a simian? So I picked my arms up and lay them in my lap. This was better, except that it meant that my hands were resting in the declivity of my crotch. As soon as I had made this move I regretted it. I didn’t want them to think, after all, that I was some kind of pervert, fondling myself in the crotch-area right in the middle of an interview. If they wouldn’t want to give the job to a simian, how much less would they want to give it to a crotch-fondler? So, and trying to be as discreet as I could, I turned both of my hands over, so that instead of resting palms down on my groin they were resting palms
upward
on my thighs. This went well, except that somehow the very tip of my right thumb got itself snagged under a fold of cloth in my trousers, such that as I moved it away the thumb
drew up
a sort of mini-tent of fabric from the material loosely folded in at my crotch. When I finished this little manoeuvre with my hands this upraised pyramid of cloth remained standing. I glanced down. This could not be making a good impression. It looked, in fact, as if I were markedly and inappropriately aroused by the mere fact of being interviewed for a job. Drastic action was required. With sudden and explosive action I coughed, shifted in my seat, and slapped my right hand down to my privates to smooth away this upward-poking fold of trouser cloth. Then, to try and cover the operation, I swung my right leg up and over my left.

That, I told myself, was one smooth manoeuvre.

My two interviewers were staring at me. The woman had her mouth slightly open.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘What was the question again?’

‘I was asking you,’ the Dr repeated, in a wary voice, ‘what experience of time travel you would bring to the position.’

‘Ah. Well, just the usual, I suppose. The standard?’

‘The standard experience?’

‘Yes, you know. One hour per hour, travelling through time, that sort of thing.’