Looking at Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang, I inevitably talk quite a bit about the racism of the story and El Sandifer's wider critique that 'Talons' represents Robert Holmes just shrugging his shoulders and not giving a damn about how he portrays anyone who's not white, middle class and basically Victorian in their outlook (1).
The most prominent recent defence of this aspect of the story (and it does seem to generally just go unacknowledged (2)) comes from Marcus Hearn in Doctor Who Magazine (3) and boils down to three points: A. The broadcast episodes are products of their time (4); B. Taking inspiration from well-known popular works (5), ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ actually subverts worse representations than its own (6); C. Holmes had no intention to demean the Chinese diaspora (7).
For a proper look at 'Talons' which gives a solid idea of how Hearn is barking up the wrong tree, I’d beg you to read Kate Orman’s essay from Doctor Who and Race (8), but I just want to take a quick cack-handed look at a couple of Hearn's points here.
First up, it's not quite clear why he's perfectly happy to acknowledge that the inspirations for 'Talons' are problematic, admittedly in what appears a bit of a grumpy way ('many of these films have been locked in a section of the archive marked ‘problematic’', though I may be reading too much into 'locked' and the inverted commas around 'problematic'), but is so resistant to labelling 'Talons' the same.
Secondly, he's very sure that the audience would be familiar with the likes of Terror of the Tongs. This seems an odd assumption about the audience for a children's show when the film had an X certificate in the cinemas and a 15 certificate on TV (9) and, according to Phil Hardy in The BFI Companion to Crime (10), there was a complete absence of Fun Manchu from the big screen between 1969’s Rio ’70 and 1980’s disastrous Peter Sellers comedy The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu. There might well have been TV repeats in the 1970s, though they would surely have been post-watershed, but that would surely render any subversion pretty irrelevant anyway and run the risk of accidentally perpetrating for vast tracts of the audience of the very attitudes they were supposedly seeking to undermine.
Finally, he's very keen to stress the 'intention' behind 'Talons' as an important consideration, but it's not easy, at least to me, to work out what the intention behind a mid-70s pastiche of Fu Manchu would have been beyond the desire to rewrap yellow peril stereotypes for an underage audience that had already demonstrated a taste for the iconography Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde and some mummy films. Maybe Holmes was already scraping the bottom of the barrel when it came to gothic inspiration, which would make the intention behind 'Talons' pretty cynical and hollow. No wonder Hinchcliffe was already looking for a new direction for the show (11).
Anyway, that's enough of defending 'Talons'. Let's see how Dicks rescues Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang.
1 Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-lion-catches-up-the-talons-of-weng-chiang
2 Try bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/talonswengchiang/detail.shtml or David J Howe, Mark Stammers, Stephen James Walker, Doctor Who: The Handbook – The Fourth Doctor for examples of covering the story without a single reference to the issue
3 And apologies here for using Marcus Hearn, writing in Doctor Who Magazine 529, as my straw dog here, but all credit to him for being one of the few examples I could find of putting such an argument in writing, even if the timing of his editorial made it all feel a bit off
4 ‘1976, when this serial began production, was a very long time ago. And you can’t judge the past by the standards of the present’ AND ‘what we can’t do is recreate the era in which they were broadcast’
Marcus Hearn, ‘Welcome’, DWM529, p.3
5 ‘Talons was inspired by the penny-dreadful booklets that caused a sensation in Victorian England. The spirit of these lurid stories endured in Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu Manchu and elsewhere. Robert Holmes would almost certainly have been familiar with the films based on that criminal mastermind, and more extreme descendants such as Hammer’s The Terror of the Tongs. He was banking on the fact that his audience was too’
Marcus Hearn, ‘Welcome’, DWM529, p.3
6 ‘Quite understandably, many of these films have been locked in a section of the archive marked ‘problematic’, making it harder for a young, modern audience to appreciate what Holmes’ pastiche was attempting to subvert’
Marcus Hearn, ‘Welcome’, DWM529, p.3
7 ‘the intention behind the work is, for me, a crucial factor’
Marcus Hearn, ‘Welcome’, DWM529, p.3
8 Doctor Who and Race (ed Lindy Orthia); Kate Orman, ‘“One Of Us Is Yellow”: Doctor Fu Manchu and The Talons of Weng Chiang’, republished at eruditorumpress.com/blog/one-of-us-is-yellow-doctor-fu-manchu-and-the-talons-of-weng-chiang-guest-post-by-kate-orman
9 According to imdb.com/title/tt0055516/parentalguide?ref_=tt_stry_pg#certification
10 Phil Hardy, The BFI Companion to Crime, p.139
11 doctorwhoputridham.wixsite.com/novelisations/blog/and-the-deadly-assassin
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