Boom Town

It was strange living in Cardiff. My girlfriend moved there a few months after we started going out and I eventually went too. We bought a house, time passed. We got married; William came along and then, the strangest thing, Doctor Who arrived. In Cardiff.

When I was a kid, all television, and therefore Doctor Who, happened in the Big House in London, Television Centre, so far away and remote that it might as well have been another dimension. The idea that any programme could be made in my vicinity was an alien concept. That Doctor Who was returning was incredible enough - but when its universe started to materialise around me, I couldn't quite believe my luck.

The place where you live always feels like the centre of the universe because that's where you are, walking around seeing and hearing things, experiencing existence and filtering reality through your location. But all of a sudden Cardiff became the centre of all things Doctor Who and, for a while, it was weird. Nice weird. At work, people would come back from lunch and say "Oh they're out filming today!" as if they were talking about the weather. Production meetings would be held in hotels down the street from our offices and I would walk past Noel Clarke or Camille Coduri on my way to the sandwich shop on the corner. I even went out to have a look at the filming of Rose, a night shoot on St. Mary's Street doubling for central London. Me and some other stunned fanboys watched the TARDIS prop being assembled on the pavement outside Howells.

"Is it a bit too.. big?" one of them whispered, full of what Gareth Roberts calls 'anticipointment'. But I was just trying to understand how it was that the TARDIS had appeared in front of my eyes, not on a television, but in my real waking life. In Cardiff.

Then, on my lunch break one day in W.H.Smith's, Billie Piper walked past me. It was February and she, like me, was looking for a Valentine's Day card. I didn't say anything of course, she was busy making Doctor Who, presumably on her lunch break too and I wasn't going to interrupt or jeopardise that magical process. Then I realised that they were probably filming close by, and that she was in costume. This was Rose Tyler, walking the streets of Cardiff. Where I lived.

They were filming just around the corner, at City Hall, working on this episode, Boom Town, which is set in, er, modern day Cardiff. My wife worked at the Wales Millenium Centre and called me to say that the TARDIS had been parked outside all day by the fountain. The fictional universe had broken through the Rift into our real lives.

We went back to Cardiff for a week this summer, partly to show the boys. We walked around and I pointed out landmarks, real and imaginary. "That's where I worked. That's where Rose worked. That's where Wilf's newspaper stand was. That's the castle where your mother and I got married - it also doubled as the Tower of London in The Christmas Invasion."

We had a good look around the Bay, ate in the restaurants, went to the Doctor Who Experience of course. It was wonderful to be back. It's changed so much in just a few years, but it still feels like home - and Doctor Who is very much part of that feeling.

It was all very fresh in the mind when we watched Boom Town, which was lovely. Throughout, the boys chorused "Been there! Been there!" every time they recognised something. There was even a hiss of indignation from them when Margaret announced that Cardiff Castle would have to be demolished to make way for her power station - that was messing with us directly. There were lots of laughs, the loudest yet, when Mickey clattered and stumbled through the corridors of City Hall and they laughed again when Margaret tried her tricks on the Doctor over dinner. They both could only give it a nine. William said it was "complicated" and raised "interesting questions. Is she a baddy? Is it her fault?" Chris said he liked the ending, but both of them were repulsed at the description of the Raxacoricofallapatorian death penalty.

The great thing about Boom Town (other than seeing Cardiff on screen, properly, on BBC1) is Eccleston's performance. Annette Badland is great as Margaret: by turns duplicitous, sincere, evil and troubled - and her scenes with the Doctor are excellent. But Eccleston is just amazing. Those tight close ups over dinner: every twitch of his face, every blink, is deliberate and calculated. It's intense and compelling and completely lacking in any crazed histrionics or bellowing. Everything is perfectly gauged and full of nuance. He is superb.

But then the TARDIS coughs up some magic light that turns the baddy into an egg and saves everyone the trouble of having to answer complicated questions. Which is a shame. It's a great ending for Margaret, and it is right that second chances should be on offer - that's a compassionate Doctorly thing to do and it won praise from all three of us. Except that the Doctor doesn't do anything to achieve this outcome and the TARDIS is transformed into some sort of genie's lamp, bestowing wishes on anyone who can rub it up the right way. It's a bit rubbish.

This is also where the rot begins to set in with Rose, sadly. Up until now she's been great, but this episode shows us how she, Jack and the Doctor look from the outside: smug, self-centred and silly. It's a brief glimpse, during which Mickey momentarily becomes the audience identification figure, but in the future, when the Doctor and Rose seem to be enjoying themselves too much, we are going to remember how this felt.

Well, I am, anyway.


NEXT TIME...

There's Lovely

Wales will always feel like home although perhaps it's blasphemy for me, being Saesneg, to say so. Coming back, even to a new part of the country, feels cosy and familiar. I lived in Wales for twelve years and still want to belong to it, if that is at all possible for an Englishman.

The relationship between the English and Welsh is a close one, still sore in places. We've been exploring some of the monuments to our joint history here in North Wales: the castles built by Edward I at the end of the 13th century. This was when Wales was subdued by the powerful English crown. By building massive castles like Harlech and Caernarfon, Edward followed up his military victories with psychologically crippling blows. These fortresses are massive, beautifully designed and brutally imposing. Today, of course, they serve the Welsh, boosting trade and tourism; nobody thinks of them as English castles anymore...

And outside of the towns, the mountains rise up, covered in grass and sheep, mottled and dappled by the shadows of the broken clouds that scud across the sky and obscure the peaks. Up and down the steep-sided valleys run tiny green steam trains on their narrow rails, belching yellow smoke into the clouds, their carriages full of waving passengers. The hills that aren't green are black, piled with broken slate from which burst blooms of purple rhododendron. And through all this twists the road, rising and falling and turning.

There's water everywhere. It rains, of course, but it also bubbles up, trickles down the mountainside and collects into streams that rush and gurgle over edges, bursting down in falls and cataracts. It drips inside the mines, sliding over the smooth rock in the darkness into the black stillness of an underground lake. Meanwhile the sea sparkles in the sunshine, rushing and moving, breaking against the cliffs and the cries of the gulls.

It's magical place; a great big country folded up into a smaller area. And this corner feels concentrated, more intensely Welsh than the rest, almost a caricature.

It's easy to leave, knowing we will always return.

St. David's Day

It turns out I am in an abusive relationship – with Texas. Our new home has showered us with friendship, generosity and hospitality and in return we are flaunting our sense of belonging… to Wales: red rugby shirts are being pressed into service for the national day. It’s a little like moving in with a new girlfriend and then throwing a party for your ex-wife’s birthday. Possibly. And as we are actually English, wilfully commemorating another nation’s holiday might seem like the height of churlishness. But to top it all, we wouldn’t dream of doing anything for St David’s Day if we were in Britain, let alone Wales itself. What’s going on?

Britishness is complicated, but more so for the English than for the other nations. The received wisdom would appear to be that, having had a thousand years or more in which to define themselves as being Not English, the Welsh, Scots and Irish contrived individual cultural identities in the 19th century, a period that saw the invention of, amongst other things, the kilt, and druids. The truth is that it is the English – or rather the Anglo Saxons – which defined themselves as being Not Celtic. The Welsh word ‘Cymry’, which those Celts took to describe themselves in post-Roman Britain, has some link to ‘community’ and means ‘fellow countrymen’. They called us ‘Saesneg’: the Saxons. The English word ‘Welsh’ comes from the Saxon description of the same people: ‘walha’, meaning ‘foreigners’ or ‘aliens’. The Welsh called themselves ‘Us’. We called them ‘Them’.

A 1,000 year old grudge match.

For some, these lines of demarcation are set in stone. But for us, personally, things have become a little blurred. Growing up in the ‘80s I had no real idea that I was English. As far as I knew, I was British; we were all British and any internal distinctions were negligible. When the rubgy came on, matches against the other Home Nations were just appetisers for the game that really mattered: playing France. It was only when I found myself suddenly living in Wales that I discovered that I was English – because the Welsh told me I was in no uncertain times. Rugby in Wales is a religion – no other sporting team in the world (apart from, possibly, the cricket teams of India and Pakistan) is so fervently and passionately supported. And the game that really matters to them is the match against England. Being English in Wales in February and March is to run the gauntlet, to live inside a crucible of ardent Welshness. Everyone is set against you – your colleagues, neighbours, random little old ladies: they are Cymry and you are not. Even Nature is on their side as the parks and verges explode with daffodils and the fields fill with leeks and lambs.

God help you if they actually win that game of rugby.

It’s fair to say that the thirteen years I spent in Wales reinforced my sense of English identity. But somewhere in the middle of all this our boys were born. You can argue that there’s not a drop of Welsh blood in either of them, but you can’t deny they have a claim on Welshness. They were obviously born in Wales. William (you can tell we thought he was English at the time) was born in Cardiff, but Christopher was born up Caerphilly Mountain which meant we had to drive to Ystrad Mynach to register him. If that doesn’t make you Welsh I don’t know what does. And of course they arrived at the end of February and the beginning of March respectively, just either side of St David’s Day. Critically – and this is the acid test – they qualify to play for Wales.

Undeniably, they have claim on a Welsh heritage even if we, their parents, do not. Whilst we lived there, it was easy enough for the schools to nurture this on our behalf. But now we are in America, there’s a definite sense that it is our job to ensure that they have access to this Welshness if they so wish. Some of my attempts at this have been laughable – does making them watch Ivor the Engine count? – but William got packed off to school in his jersey this morning, just like all the boys (and some of the girls) in Cardiff. It feels odd that it matters and I worry, in case I am actually doing this for my benefit and not his.

Weirdly, because this is also the time of year for Rodeo, Friday was ‘Dress Western’ day at school, which means that all the boys and girls wore they ‘duds’, i.e. dressed as cowboys. In a sense, this is just the Texan version of St David’s Day, and Rodeo is just the equivalent of rugby. Instead of daffodils, we have blue bonnets, or will in a few weeks. But there’s something missing here. Why does the Reliant Stadium full of Texans not feel more like the Millennium Stadium full of Welsh people? The difference, I think, is that to be English here is nothing more than a passing novelty in a nation of people that nearly all started off as something else. And our role in the creation of America is largely meaningless 200 years later on. Whereas in Wales, to be English is to be the thing that they are not, the very opposite of Cymry and our role in shaping and defining Them from the outside is still at the centre of our relationship with each other, after over a thousand years. Strangely, perhaps, I think this makes Wales an easier place to love but, then, we are back to abusive relationships aren't we?

Happy St David's Day to all our Welsh friends and, er, family. You'll be simultaneously appalled and delighted to know that I was cheering you all on against Scotland and France but not, of course, against England - better luck next year!