Keir Starmer to regenerate into Rose Tyler for some reason.
Before I became an author and comedian, I wanted to be an actor. One evening I was drinking at a friend’s house, which really does not narrow anything of my teenaged life down at all. We had one friend who didn’t drink who you will be pleased to know was also there, and also having fun.
In fact our whole crew had convened, all of us eager for the new season of Doctor Who, now David Tennant was gone. I wore a tweed jacket with a bow tie, pretending I was “the fifteenth doctor”. Matt Smith was revealed in this episode, and minutes later he was arguing with a young Amy Pond about food, and my friends and I were arguing over what odd flavour combination he’d settle on. He goes for fish fingers, and I shout AND CUSTARD.
A second later, Matt Smith does the same.
I was right.
Maybe I have magic powers, or maybe Dr Who writers could predict the outfits and dietary choices of teenaged nerds like myself. Or maybe, my pattern recognition was such that I could predict what the writers would do next…
Pattern recognition aside, Dr Who has ended now (which I also predicted), as has Keir Starmer’s apparent leadership of the UK.
So, what happens next?
Timey Wimey f*cky uppy
Keir Starmer’s resignegeneration was briefly halted by a sonic attack from a serial political heckler who won’t be named because I cannot be bothered googling him, who played ODE TO JOY1 so loud that it sounded as if the angels themselves were celebrating, which they might have been, if holes in the ozone layer didn’t suck them all off in 2006.
Citing low viewer ratings of the popular ‘reality’ TV show, THE UNITED KINGDOM, The actual United Kingdom has got rid of its old mascot, Keir Starmer, and is about to usher in someone who has been specially engineered in a laboratory to be worse.
Yes that’s right, since beginning this post, the Rose Tyler reveal was cancelled!
But it might come back.
But it might get cancelled again!
But it might come back!
Ad infinitum.
“We did consider a robot dog for Prime Minister, but it proved to have too much personality, and that startled voters” - said the UK government
Perhaps this new person, with cartoon eyebrows and a cartoon character’s depth of understanding of the world, might have their own strange ideas.
Perhaps they will partner murderers with vulnerable pensioners in the hopes the kindness of the pensioners rubs off on them.
“It is just unrealistic, this claim that murderers in old people’s homes target old people in those same homes. Yes, it’s happened twice this week, but that is really not that many. Does anyone here think Two is a big number? Don’t be ridiculous. There are bigger numbers, like Three.” - says future overlord.
Maybe they’ll release violent prisoners early to stop overcrowding2
Or maybe they’ll engineer spiders that listen to your private conversations.
Or design phones out of gas so they cannot be grasped by passing phone grabbers whilst you’re using google maps to figure out where the cute coffee shop went.
Maybe they’ll lower the voting age to Minus One, meaning each and every one of your eggs and sperm can now vote.
“Don’t waste your vote, seal your scrote.” - says poster in pub toilet.
Maybe they’ll scrap funding for the people who decide on scrapping funding, thus creating a black hole out of paradoxical £10 notes as the funding scrapping scrap funders thunder their way through scrapping the un-funding of the un-funders who funded the initial un-funds.
I know you skim read that bit. It’s okay.
Maybe pensioners will be arrested by the government as soon as their state pension rolls in, and they will be declared legally dead so nobody has to remember to turn the heating on for them in the winter. Being old will be illegal. The government would even be able to whack them (not in the mobster sense) with inheritance tax whilst they are still biologically alive, forcing them to do the grunt work of filling out all the forms.
Anything could happen.
It truly will be like an episode of Doctor Who, and not one of the good ones. In this one, if someone you know gets nearly exterminated by an alien, there won’t be another, posher alien with a proclivity for younger female companions to save them. They won’t be time-diddled out of the way, or age-regressed so they are shorter and the death bolt zips through their teenage quiff. No, they will just get dead.
And you will be swept up in a time sneeze before you can even grieve. If you don’t forget this person after several ‘episodes’ (the duration of time in which a scandal is covered by the mainstream press) then you will be given a visit from the brain worms, who will rewrite your memory of events.
And it won’t be daleks doing the lasering. No, rather than Sci-Fi murder mechs (inspired of course by real-world murder machines3) UK streets will be patrolled by stupid human zombies and intelligent robot cars alike, both of whom have their own motives for destroying you.
Worry not, however, the government under our new overlord will edit in censor-triangles which will barely cover things up, like when you got too excited colouring as a child and went outside the lines.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
If you want to know what really happened, you can pay a newspaper of your choice to show you the footage, who will then inundate you with their feelings and their interpretations about the footage, because honest journalism was bundled into the back of a van a few weeks ago.
Reality is no longer objective.
Now everything is an opinion piece, and I am aware of the irony. Everyone wants to tell you how to feel, how to react, and the system is watching carefully to see if the panicked reaction engineered in you can be criminalised or at the very least, labelled as a mental health condition.
Oh, the articles we’ve been showing you five times a day made you scared? Have you tried this new pill?
In this glorious endless future, you can even rent out a slice of British parkland for an approved walk. You can listen to a guided audio tour of where trees used to be, or look at a performing art piece about what frogs were. Why not venture to the castles, which have been meticulously taken apart as they represent hostile sentiment toward sieges. The castles, like life itself, are now two-dimensional representations of a much more complicated reality. But don’t look at reality. We don’t trust you with it.
In these parks there will be dog hours and dogless hours. Respect them. Don’t take dogs at dogless hours, but do take dogs at dog hours. If you fail to take a dog during dog hours, one will be allocated to you, or you will be humanely destroyed. The dog of course will have 13 prior dog arrests4 for mauling people, so you’ll be slightly safer with the dog than you would be alone in a modern shopping centre.
If you have an Alpaca, please stay somewhere between both states of being (dogged and dogless) as we have not the proper legislation in place and Alpacas are legally giraffes for the time being and it might take a decade for us to bother fixing that.
Our new immortal leader
Gliding in on a skirt of TV cables, our immortal leader god will retain all the memories of previous prime ministers, but will have none of the endearing or redeeming personality quirks which I am sure existed, and I am sure you remember from all the others. One of them had a bird living on his head, right?
Minister Prime, as it shall be called, will claim it cannot be retired like an old replicant, but will instead evolve alongside the human species and guide us gently into the light, that’s right, go to sleep now.
Fun facts!
Whilst not biologically a Timelord, Minister Prime was in fact born on Gallifrey, the planet of the time lords5, so according to galactic law he is legally a Timelord citizen, which means that he is in fact entitled to as many reincarnations as he needs to fix the pot holes. Our bet is one hundred and twenty eight billion, seventy two million, four hundred thousand, seven hundred and fifty eight point nine new Minister Primes before you can drive your car in a suburban area without giving it the car equivalent of when you sit down too fast and crush your testicles on a bus seat.
Minister Prime was replaced by a brain worm with delusions of grandeur at some point in the last century, but it has made precisely zero difference to policy.
Action figures of Minister Prime were cancelled in 2030, owing to the toy company not being able to identify any actions the Minister Prime ever took.
Ooo Wee Ooo
As Britain rolls drunk down the hill of time, toward a hideous future in which a ‘meal deal’ is what the new supermarket TescLidlDi calls the weekend cannibalism special, we contemplate the technicalities of technicolour reincarnation, and what it means for all of us.
Special Effects supervisor Craig Somethingorother was asked about how they plan to do the regeneration scene where Keir is replaced by Rose Tyler.
“One of the issues with turning a Prime Minister into a beloved character is that you have to change them completely, but the audience immediately forgets what they look like. What we’ve decided to do, is to have the regeneration off screen. You’ll be reading the paper one day and the leader will be different, and that’s how we will do it moving forward. The character will be basically the same as well. No big deal, no special effects. I am still getting paid though, right?”
The degeneration
Whilst cries of MAKE BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN are ridiculed for their reliance on memories of a Britain that might not have ever existed, the phrase still speaks to a powerful emotional tool.
Nostalgia is the weapon which our new unnamed overlord will use against us.
Human traffickers tell PHD engineers from far away lands that Britain is a land of pissless red phone boxes, polite Hugh Grant characters bumbling about on the tube apologising to each other, and quaint boat races and poetry recitals. These aspiring tech wizards will be in love with the idea of Britain, and who can blame them? They will be told that they will come here and be happy and rich, and definitely will not be bullied into being underpaid food delivery drivers who have to sleep in car parks, within puking distance of the nearest night club.
Nostalgia shall lure them here. Poverty shall trap them.
And in the background an endless procession of new leaders will fade in and out of existence, like the blinking of a lighthouse from afar.
History repeats
It is often said that history repeats itself because re-runs are cheaper than new shows. Our leaders can keep regenerating, keep promising us beautiful things, but one day we might need to stop relying on the weird posh man who lives in a cupboard and uses alien technology to rewrite history.
That is why I propose a spin-off series to the UK, just like Dr Who had its own spin off series. We shall call it…
MorningWood.
And I think we shall set sail tomorrow, and perhaps start our new home… hmmm… I dunno, I’ve heard there’s this big place called Turtle Island…
COME TO MY COMEDY SHOW PLEASE I HAVE SOLD MAYBE 3 TICKETS.
Endnote:
I want to say something quick about near-future posts here on Substack. It’s brief enough that it didn’t warrant its own post (I don’t like talking as and when I have a new thought, that’s what Twitter, or evening buses, are for) but long enough that I put it in this grey box to distance it from the post itself.
I am at a point in my career where I have to do what works in order to build the infrastructure for the weird stories of tomorrow.
My posts about Dr Who, The X Files, Free Speech, or other real-world things have outperformed my own fiction or poetry posts by about 10x.
The only exceptions to this rule are the stories MYCELIAL and FULL SPECTRUM, the former being a runner up to the Lunar Awards, thus bringing in more readers, and the latter being picked up and published by Tiny Worlds, thus bringing in, again, more readers.
I am still the same person, still writing 100% human stuff.
And I am still a novelist, still a short story writer and poet (my next post is actually about poetry), it’s just that there are things happening outside my imaginary worlds which I can also write about, and which bother me if I don’t write about them.
This won’t get in the way of the fiction.
My specialism seems to be tackling the topics many of my fellow writers understandably don’t want to tackle (like my Roald Dahl retroactive censorship story) or which they are squeamish about.
I am hesitant to post all of them, but you can expect one or two over the next few months, once I’ve polished them.
Introduced in 2027, dog arrests allowed dogs with antisocial behaviour to be locked up. Yet, predictably, most dog arrests would later turn out to be for dogs whose nervous growling at the television was deemed offensive to televisions
At time of writing, Gallifrey was the planet of Dr Who’s timelords, but I imagine they’ll rewrite that before I have a chance to edit this post. God forbid they move FORWARDS with the story