A Man of Boundless Imagination (Mad Dogs and Englishmen) (Patreon)

My mother Elizabeth Sandifer gave me a chance to write about Tolkien for Tardis Eruditorum Volume 8, coming soon to a bookshelf near you if we play our cards right.

It’s January, 2002. Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman are at number one with “Somethin’ Stupid,” unseated a week into the month by Daniel Bedingfield’s “Gotta Get Thru This,” which yields a week later to Aaliyah’s “More than a Woman,” which goes a week later for a posthumous rerelease of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” which finally gives way to Enrique Iglesias’s “Hero,” and frankly I suspect mom gave me this book to write about just so she wouldn’t have to do all of that. Some other people also chart and she can write that herself if she wants to.

In news, since The Adventuress of Henrietta Street Enron crashed into the largest bankruptcy in US history, a terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi saw nine people killed along with five terrorists, the Leaning Tower of Pisa reopened, and Richard Reid’s attempt at a shoe bomb ensured airplane travelers had to take their shoes off for years. Meanwhile, this month the Euro comes into use in the Eurozone, the No Child Left Behind Act is signed into law, and Daniel Pearl is kidnapped in Pakistan. But let’s go back to December, with the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings, the first film in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Doctor Who and The Lord of the Rings are twin works: extremely long-running works of epic speculative fiction whose impact on British popular culture is absolutely essential. Both turn a Victorian tradition of colonial adventure storytelling into twisting narrative labyrinths, giving everyone from mainstream audiences to incestuous anoraks a profoundly absorbing pastime.

The two works diverge in terms of authorship. While Doctor Who is a palimpsest crafted by thousands of artists, The Lord of the Rings, while indubitably impacted by countless figures, is ultimately contiguous with its author J. R. R. Tolkien. Middle-earth texts since Tolkien’s death are directly in dialogue with Tolkien in a way that most Doctor Who is simply not with Verity Lambert and David Whitaker.

The two works have limited influence on each other. Perhaps Doctor Who’s delivery via the public service of the BBC has deterred its showrunners and authors from touching Tolkien’s relatively more unified work, while Middle-earth, at least in its literary form, is largely insulated from outside influences beyondTolkien’s favorite literature. Yet both texts are fundamentally and openly British, dialoguing with their historical contexts and the changing nature of readership and genre fiction. They tap into magical traditions, knowingly or not.

Both The Lord of the Rings and Doctor Who, while popular, are hardly the most famous products in popular culture. The Lord of the Rings languished in obscurity for a decade before unauthorized American paperbacks launched onto the New York Times bestseller list, while Doctor Who fizzled out in the Eighties and endured the Nineties as paperbacks for nerds. Both works experienced a slow burn before a late explosion into new popularity.

2002 is a perfect moment for Doctor Who and The Lord of the Rings to intersect. Before that period, both texts were the province of anoraks with too much free time. By the early Aughts, both Tolkien and TARDIS began renaissances, culminating in Peter Jackson’s smash hit trilogy and Russell T Davies’ successful reboot.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen finds Doctor Who and The Lord of the Rings finally meeting at the intersection of these two eras. By this point we are firmly into the tail end of the Wilderness Years, with the Eighth Doctor Adventures having lost the mandate and Big Finish not long from doing so itself. And as mom has noted, the Eighth Doctor Adventures were always sandwiched between the more fondly remembered Virgin New Adventures and the actually-seen-by-human-beings televised Doctor Who.

At the same time, The Lord of the Rings, while respected and well-known, was only just becoming ahousehold name among non-nerds, a development that renders Mad Dogs and Englishmen both timely and in a strange liminal space between pre- and post-Jackson. Even the plot element of a potentially atrocious film adaptation of a classic work has aged strangely, given how at this point, probably more people love Jackson’s version than Tolkien’s.

While Doctor Who and The Lord of the Rings minimally influence each other, their roles in British popular culture have often been similar. With Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Paul Magrs finds an intersection for Time Lords and hobbits. His solution to the problem of “why don’t these two forces interact more often?” is to posit them as vital sources of the fantastic in British literature.

The plot of Mad Dogs and Englishmen is as much a batshit romp as a cheeky meta-commentary on its source material. It features Reginald Tyler (so close yet so far), a British academic and World War I veteran who creates The True History of Planets, a sprawling epic work which he leaves unfinished upon his death. Nobody needs me to explain the jokes here — there’s even a C. S. Lewis stand-in character named “Cleavis,” while Tyler’s wife is named Enid.

The pastiche is funny enough, but Magrs avoids one-to-one matches by changing major details. Enid Tyler greedily sinks her claws into her late husband’s estate (quite unlike Edith Tolkien), and The True History of Planets is unfinished when Tolkien dies. (Yes, Middle-earth is a permanently unfinished tale, but The Lord of the Rings is a completed work.)

Then there’s the biggest departure from Tolkien, which is the pink poodles with hands who bounce around planets interfering with time and botching adaptations of Tyler’s work. While extraterrestrial interference would explain The Desolation of Smaug, that film’s dour tone lacks the glam weirdness of Mad Dogs and Englishmen. The book’s cover art, depicting a pink poodle handling a gun and a cigarette holder, is the single greatest visual in all of Doctor Who, and prevents the book rom being either a straightforward Tolkien pastiche or a daft Doctor Who tie-in novel.

Instead,the book essentially trolls its audience, incessantly touching on Tolkien, both lovingly homaging and cheekily parodying him, while never quite turning into a Lord of the Rings pastiche. Not unreasonably so — Christopher Tolkien was still alive when Mad Dogs and Englishmen dropped in 2002, and could easily have shown up at Magrs’ door with a shiv.

One throwaway joke shows the game entirely. Apparently John Waters’ The Lord of the Rings exists in this universe, with Noël Coward as Aragorn (presumably because John Hurt doesn’t exist in the world of Doctor Who, and so can’t play the role in Ralph Baski’s version). As a result, Mad Dogs and Englishmen is both toying with Middle-earth and playing its own game.

The namedrops of John Waters and Noël Coward, both gay icons, are particularly revealing. While Waters’ mention is a simple throwaway gag, Noël Coward actually shows up in Mad Dogs and Englishmen, ultimately playing the villain, and, of course, supplying the title, which nods to a famous Coward song. This is Magrs, a queer writer whose cop father abandoned him after a gay-bashing catastrophe in his teens, writing one of the 20th century’s most beloved British artists as a gay villain. This isn’t just Doctor Who and Tolkien—it’s queer Doctor Who and Tolkien.

Both canons have a queer tradition. The Lord of the Rings’ depiction of Frodo and Sam’s relationship is famously homoerotic, featuring kisses and nudity, as Molly Ostertag has written in her brilliant Polygon essay. Jackson’s adaptation, with heartthrobs Sean Astin and Elijah Wood making google eyes at each other for 30 hours, frankly makes calling it subtext a stretch.

The queer history of Doctor Who isn’t news to anybody who’s this far into the book, of course. As mom has pointed out at length, Doctor Who was largely kept alive in the nineties and early aughts by its queer fans, including Paul Magrs. Occasionally some trad anorak will pop up and accuse gays of sabotaging Doctor Who for the gay agenda, when clearly one of the show’s biggest flaws is its lack of wall-to-wall explicit queerness.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen wears its gayness on its, if not sleeve, then its paperback cover. It’s hard to imagine anything gayer than Noël Coward working with evil gay poodles, unless you throw some poppers and polyamory into the mix (Magrs does not in fact do this, therefore exposing the limits of Doctor Who). Add to this the fact that the poodles are actively working to thwart the literary canon by injecting poodles with hands into The True History of Planets, and you have an interplanetary conspiratorial sabotage story that would make Iain M. Banks nods approvingly.

It takes Paul Magrs, a gay man who never saw his cop father again after suffering a hate crime, to claim the British literary canon and Doctor Who at the same time. He writes a love letter to English literature that treats Doctor Who with the same respect as any beloved Gilbert and Sullivan work. It takes gay cheekiness and a love of literature to unite two of Britain’s longest-running fantastical texts. And nothing glues those things together like a poodle who shoots you to death.