The Machine vs Human Touch
How Wallace & Gromit and Doctor Who's Christmas TV outings explore the power of technology and the need for embodied relationships
(Belated) goodbye to 2024! Writing my newsletter was on pause (as were paid subscriptions) for most of last year. I’ve had a lot going on: I’ve been busy bringing up three kids, moving from Cardiff to Pontypridd, and changing jobs from working at Media Cymru to being Publisher at Calon Books. However, my new publishing role wasn’t shaping up quite how I hoped, so I’ve made the decision to go freelance again as a writer, editor and digital consultant!
I’m excited for the freedom and flexibility that will bring, and I hope it’ll mean a bit more room for my own writing again alongside my editing and digital work. If you’re interested in engaging my services, check out www.calebwoodbridge.com.
I enjoyed much of my brief time at Calon though and I’m proud to have edited some fascinating books – watch out later this year for Raider: The Raymond Chester Story by Jon Gower, My Year of Reading Welshly by Alex Johnson and Circus Rebels: The Inside Story of NoFit State Circus by Stephen Glascoe – as well as having been involved with many other titles in various ways.
I’ve also had quite a few spiritual ups and downs and I’ll perhaps share more about that in a later post…
For now though, I want to cast a glance over some of the Christmas telly, and catch up with thoughts on the latest Doctor Who and Wallace and Gromit…
A Christmas tale of two British icons
Doctor Who and Wallace and Gromit have a strange family resemblance: an eccentric scientist getting into adventures with his companion, shot through with quirky British humour.
The Doctor, of course, is by-and-large genuinely heroic as a time-travelling do-gooder, whereas bumbling inventor Wallace tends to haplessly be the creator of his own problems, little realising how much he owes to his dog Gromit.
Doctor Who’s new Christmas special Joy to the World, penned by veteran Doctor Who writer and former showrunner Steven Moffat, and new Wallace and Gromit feature Vengeance Most Fowl, with the return of villainous penguin Feathers McGraw, were part of a strong BBC line-up this Christmas.
Smart-gnomes and Star Seeds: When Technology Goes Wrong
On Christmas 2025, their plots were both animated by technology, and the tension between its use for good or for evil, whether that was ‘smart-gnome’ Norbot or a ‘star seed’ capable of birthing an artificial star (and risking burning up planet Earth in the process). In this, we see some of the current anxieties about the pace of technological change, especially with the rise of ‘AI’ Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude.
Wallace and Gromit provided a surprisingly sharp and on-point critique of our over-dependence on technology, satirising everything from the annoying – such as night-time disturbances from glowing gadgets – to the profoundly misguided, such as Wallace’s Pat-O-Matic, which outsources petting his beloved dog Gromit to a robot hand. “And if you think that’s progress, wait ’til you see the next thing I’m working on!” chirps Wallace, oblivious to Gromit’s disappointment, before introducing Norbot to look after the garden instead of Gromit – taking away a source of solace and recreation for Gromit.
Of course, the technology can be subverted from “Good” to “Evil” by the malevolent Feathers McGraw, who hacks in and reprograms Norbot’s core protocol, with disastrous consequences (but hilarious, to us the viewers at home). But the technology was problematic even before being hijacked: the story echoes the concern of critics like Neil Postman, who argued that technology isn't merely additive but ecological – each new technology changes the entire environment of human relationships and activities.
Beyond Good and Evil? The Nature of Technology
Another popular view of technology is that it is essentially neutral – it all depends on the intentions of the person (or penguin) using it. This view is reflected in the use of the star seed in Doctor Who – it is created by the villainous Villengard corporation for the purposes of fuelling their weapons manufacture. But in the end its use is subverted: the star seed tries to possess Joy in order to get to the right place in time and space via the Time Hotel. But Joy is able to take control of the star seed, merging with it to become the star of Bethlehem(!)
A technology created for evil is redirected towards goodness. This is a hallmark of Moffat’s writings, right the way back to his first Doctor Who story The Empty Child, in which the creepy gas-mask zombies weren’t evil at all, but malfunctioning nanogenes that the Doctor restored to their original healing purpose. His work tends towards a techno-optimism, suggesting that technology can transform humanity for the better, such as by offering a technological ‘salvation’ from death in a simulated reality, as in Silence in the Library.
Embodiment vs virtual connection
So far, so jolly and Christmassy (if mildly subversive of the Christian nativity story). But there’s another theme at play here, and that’s the importance of embodiment. Joy’s story also touches on this theme – her reason for isolation at Christmas is one of grief and trauma at her mother’s death during Covid, where she could only say goodbye to her via an iPad screen, lacking the human touch.
But to my mind it’s a disappointment that Joy’s resolution is not an embodied one, but a technological transcendence. Consciousnesses being uploaded or transferred is a common trope of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who, all the way back to River Song dying and going to virtual reality heaven in Silence in the Library. Here the suitcase containing the star seed absorbs the consciousnesses of the victims it possesses. Trev, the hapless loser who gets killed by it early on, survives as Holo-Trev, who finds his own post-mortem fulfilment in helping the Doctor and Joy save the day.
Joy undergoes her own transformation, merging with the Star Seed to detonate it safely far from Earth, saving the world with a brand new star glowing in the sky… in the year 1 above the skies of Bethlehem.
Later in history, the same star shines down on Joy’s mother as she is about to die in 2020, she glows and streams up to the star, implying that they have somehow been reunited in some disembodied star-state.
It’s a happy ending of sorts, I suppose, but feels oddly disconnected from Joy’s trauma at not getting to actually be with her mother physically. The story ends up wavering thematically on the importance of embodiment, which is a shame at Christmas, when key to the Christmas story is the idea of Incarnation, as I’ll get to in a moment.
However, the value of embodiment comes through loud and clear in Vengeance Most Fowl. The moral is spelled out in Wallace’s final realisation that “There are some things a machine just can’t do”. At the end of their latest madcap adventure, he finally gives Gromit a real pat: the human touch and connection, that his friend has been longing for.
Incarnation and human connection
At the heart of the Christmas story is the idea that in the baby Jesus, the Christ-child, God became flesh to dwell among us. In the Christian story, he came not just to save our souls for heaven, but to redeem our bodies and renew the world.
You don’t need to be a Christian to resonate with the importance this places on embodiment. We are flesh and blood, and this is very good. It is in sight, sound, touch, in meeting face-to-face, that we have community and relationship with one another.
Of course, digital connection is better than no connection at all, and a wonderful option to have where necessary. But like the Pat-O-Matic, we can all too often substitute it where real, embodied interaction is both possible and necessary.
So as we head into another year that will loom large with the challenges of AI and place of digital technology in our lives, let’s keep hold of the priority of embodied human connection.
What did you think of ‘Vengeance Most Fowl’ and ‘Joy to the World’? How do you feel they handled the themes of technology, and am I being unfair to Doctor Who? Let me know in the comments below!
