Timeless Adventures (5 page)

It was 27 September 1963 before
Doctor Who
’s first episode went before the cameras (and it had to be re-shot on 18 October after Sydney Newman decided it was not technically polished enough for broadcast). By this time, Lambert had three additional storylines at various stages of preparation.
The Tribe of Gum
was Anthony Coburn’s caveman adventure (with the first episode featuring much of CE Webber’s series-setting material from his abandoned ‘Giants’ storyline), and this was to be followed by the same writer’s
The Robots
, about a future world dominated by robotic life forms. Beyond this, John Lucarotti had been commissioned to write
A Journey to Cathay
, a historical adventure featuring Marco Polo, and former Tony Hancock comedy scriptwriter Terry Nation was working on
The Survivors
, about a race mutated due to a radiation war. Other writers had also been contacted and the TV industry was sufficiently aware of the upcoming series that agents and writers had started to submit unsolicited storylines and sample scripts. By the end of October, the BBC hierarchy had only officially committed to 13 episodes of
Doctor Who
, consisting of an opening episode establishing the premise and the characters; three episodes of the caveman adventure; a seven-part serial; and a (possibly concluding) self-contained two-part serial. The future of the show beyond that point would be decided in the New Year based upon its success, or failure, to attract an audience for the early-Saturdayevening transmission slot between November 1963 and February 1964.

The recording of what is now regarded as the ‘pilot’ episode of
Doctor Who
was a fraught affair, with fluffed lines, problems with the complicated TARDIS set (the Doctor’s time-space ship), wobbly camerawork and badly played-in music. When Newman viewed the episode the following week, he made a number of comments, covering everything from technical issues to characterisation. He didn’t think the character of the Doctor was ‘funny’ enough, while he felt that Susan was ‘too dour’. He also felt that the two teachers didn’t react strongly enough to the situation of their pupil being seemingly locked up in a box. In technical terms alone, Newman deemed the episode not suitable for transmission. Revealing his personal commitment to the show, he gave Lambert and Hussein permission to remount the recording of the first episode, revising it accordingly. Lessons having been learnt, both felt that, second time around, they could improve on the first effort. In the second version, some of the original dialogue, which pinned down the Doctor and Susan’s origins to ‘the forty-ninth century’, was rewritten to become the vaguer ‘We are wanderers in the fourth dimensions of space and time, cut off from our own planet…’ This simple act allowed for decades of fan speculation and production-team reinvention of the Doctor’s mysterious origins. Hartnell’s Doctor was also made less abrasive in the second version of the episode, following Newman’s guidance that the serial’s leading character had to be more sympathetic (or, at least, slightly less alien).

Although the show was off to a shaky start within the BBC, those involved in making it felt they were producing something unusual that would at least be interesting to a wide range of viewers. It was certainly unlike anything the TV audience had seen before. From the unusual, swirling title sequence and unearthly, ‘whooshing’ theme tune,
Doctor Who
was laying claim to territory the BBC had not previously explored. The show was verging on the avant-garde in its unique visual and aural effects, and must have been something of a shock to a 1963 TV audience unused to such weird images and sounds on regular television.

The innovative design of the
Doctor Who
titles, music, TARDIS exterior and interior and the Daleks played a huge part in the impact of the new science-fantasy show. The opening titles were devised by Lambert and associate producer Mervyn Pinfield, who was continuing to supervise the show’s technical requirements. Drawing on the work of an experimental technical group within the BBC, led by Bernard Lodge, the
Doctor Who
team used electronic visual feedback to create the otherworldly, swirling clouds out of which came the words ‘Doctor Who’ and (later) the Doctor’s face. ‘I think it just looked so very strange and different from anything else,’ Lambert said of the show’s opening visuals. ‘I just didn’t want it to look like “time” – I wanted it to look familiar but odd, which is what the
Doctor Wh
o theme [tune] was.’

The series’ theme tune had been developed by Delia Derbyshire from the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, working from a composition by prolific TV-theme composer Ron Grainer. The rhythmic, pulsing theme seemed to match the abstract titles, while the weird bubbling and whooshing sounds set up the viewer to anticipate something unusual. Lambert and Derbyshire’s inspiration was the French abstract
musique concrete
movement, which also influenced the selection of the series’ early stock incidental episodic music. The scene-setting of the titles and music were just the curtain raiser to the drama about to unfold in front of an unsuspecting Saturday-teatime TV audience.

BBC staff designer Peter Brachacki designed the TARDIS interior (revised by Barry Newberry when the pilot episode was remounted), while Ray Cusick interpreted Terry Nation’s description of the Daleks for the second story. Taking up half the floor space within the studio, the interior of the TARDIS was in dramatic contrast with the limited police-box exterior. The large recessed circles on the interior walls contrasted with the hard, straight lines of the police-box shape. In the middle of the all-white room was the ship’s control console, a six-sided unit built around the (later-named) ‘time rotor’ central column, which would rise and fall to indicate the ship was in flight (combined with effective sounds). The hexagonal console reflected the staggered, almost hexagonal patterns made by the (fan-named) ‘roundels’ on the walls. At the end of the 2008 series, in the episode
Journey’s End
, it is revealed that this six-sided console had been designed to accommodate the six pilots required to fly the TARDIS properly (a fan theory incorporated into the ongoing epic televisual narrative). Softening the alien effect of the ship’s interior were the furniture and artefacts from various times that Brachacki chose to dress the set. This reinforced the Doctor’s quasi-Victorian demeanour and suggested that the ship’s original occupants had already travelled widely in history. All these design elements, absorbed by viewers in a near unconscious manner, went a long way to creating the initial impact of
Doctor Who
. The opening episode effectively bridged the narrative gap from the ordinary and everyday lives of a pair of London schoolteachers to the adventures in time and space that the series would pursue for the next 45 years and beyond.

According to BBC records, an audience of 4.4 million viewers were watching at 5.15pm on 23 November (the day following the assassination of President Kennedy) as the first episode of
Doctor Who
, entitled
An Unearthly Child
, was broadcast. The episode introduced the title character and his granddaughter Susan Foreman, a pupil at Coal Hill School who intrigues her science and history teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. As the teachers compare notes on their pupil, who is brilliant at some things and curiously ignorant of others, they follow her home to a junkyard in Totter’s Lane. When the teachers enter the yard, Susan appears to have vanished, but there is a curious sight: a police box. Usually found on street corners, this police box is rather unusual: ‘It’s alive,’ exclaims Ian as he discovers an electronic hum emanating from the strange blue box. The teachers hide as an older man, apparently Susan’s grandfather, enters the yard and prepares to enter the mysterious box. Hearing Susan’s voice coming from inside, the teachers engage the old man in debate and then force their way through the doors.

So far, so familiar, may have been most TV viewers’ reaction to this pseudo-domestic drama that wasn’t too different in style from a contemporary 1960s TV drama like
Z-Cars
. Apart from the strange music and swirling patterns in the title sequence, the first half of
Doctor Who
’s debut episode actually plays like a social-realist tale about a pupil and her concerned teachers. It’s only when the action cuts, at the halfway mark, to inside the mysterious police box that
Doctor Who
really demonstrates its dramatic difference from anything else airing on British television in 1963.

The teachers spill into a vast white space, much bigger than the police box that seems to contain it. As they express astonishment at their new environment, the camera takes in the six-sided central control console, the circular indents on the walls and the computer banks and TV screen. As the Doctor taunts the confused and concerned teachers about their failure to understand what they see, and Susan pleads for her grandfather to free them, he sets the TARDIS in motion. As the ship rocks violently, knocking all the occupants unconscious, the series leads into its first ever cliff-hanger. Disappearing from contemporary London, the police box reappears in a desolate, primitive landscape, only for the shadow of a humanoid creature to fall across it. As the unfamiliar, eerie theme music returned, those initial 4.4 million viewers could have been left in no doubt that they were no longer watching a social-realist drama in the style of
Z-Cars
. There was nothing else on television the audience could compare
Doctor Who
to. All they could do was tune in again at the same time the following week to find out what would happen next.

Tune in they did, with viewing figures increasing by almost two million between the first two episodes. Concerned that the news of the assassination of John F Kennedy might have overshadowed the launch of the new series, the BBC repeated
An Unearthly Child
on Saturday 30 November, following it immediately with the serial’s second episode,
The Cave of Skulls
. Around 6.4 million viewers were watching that night. The remaining three episodes of the first serial (collectively, the first four episodes are now widely known as
An Unearthly Child
) saw the time travellers getting to know each other as they fought to survive the conflict between the two would-be leaders of a primitive tribe of humans. Ian and Barbara are reluctant travellers, catapulted into a nightmare against their wills. For his part, the Doctor didn’t invite them to enter his ship, so feels little responsibility for their subsequent troubles, even though only he and the TARDIS can get them back to 1963. Hartnell’s Doctor, although softened through Sydney Newman’s intervention, is still a selfish and potentially violent character. In the serial’s third episode,
The Forest of Fear
, he is seen preparing to use a heavy stone to attack a wounded caveman in order that the group might escape. The story sees the travellers introduce fire to the caveman culture in the last episode,
The Firemaker
, and they escape to the TARDIS, pursued by the cavemen. As the ship dematerialises once more, any thoughts of safety are lost as they arrive at a new, even more alien destination and a radiation meter (unseen by the characters, but visible to the audience) lurches into the danger zone. This element, where one complete adventure would end with a cliff-hanger leading into the next, would soon be abandoned, but it served in the early months to blur the separation between one adventure and the next in the minds of the audience and would keep them viewing, one week to the next, one story to the next.

Amid the strangeness of the design, the incongruity of the police box and the oddness of the Doctor, there was arguably one thing that ensured the success of
Doctor Who
during those first few weeks on air: the arrival of the Daleks.

There is a certain irony to the fact that the very element which ensured the new show’s future were the ‘bug-eyed monsters’ Sydney Newman and the committee that developed the show had hoped to avoid in their pursuit of literary science fiction for the screen. From the second serial’s first-episode audience of 6.9 million (on a par with the preceding episodes), the audience would grow to in excess of 10 million by the end of the seven-part story entitled
The Daleks
. As 1963 ended, a delighted Donald Baverstock officially renewed the series, extending the run from the initial 13 episodes to 36 weeks. Thanks to the Daleks, who’d go on to become his perpetual, recurring enemy,
Doctor Who
was here to stay.

Scripted by Terry Nation, the Dalek serial featured situations and images that would have resonated greatly with an audience that had lived through the Second World War only 20 years before. In Nation’s simplistic storyline, the hideously mutated Daleks are the fascist forces, while the pacifist, humanist Thals (in a neat inversion, they are blonde haired and seemingly blue-eyed – traditional Aryan traits) represented the various nations of the world forced to fight for their own survival.

Nation’s script described the Daleks thus: ‘Hideous, machine-like creatures [with] no human features. A lens of a flexible shaft that acts as an eye. Arms with mechanical grips for hands.’ It’s unclear exactly how Nation envisaged the Daleks should look: that was a detail he was willing to leave to the BBC designers, even though – as it turned out – he was to profit greatly from their iconic design. The main creative force behind the visual impact of the Dalek machine was BBC staff designer Raymond Cusick. It was Cusick, following Nation’s blueprint, who tried to make the creatures as inhuman looking as possible, eliminating the human outline by removing arms, legs and any recognisable face. That the design was fundamentally unaltered when
Doctor Who
returned to television, over 40 years and several production teams later, is a testament to the vision of Nation and, particularly, Cusick.

Why did the Daleks capture the imagination of the UK’s children, in particular? Their distinctive movements and grating, halting vocals were easy to imitate, a practice which quickly erupted in playgrounds up and down the land following Christmas 1963. They were easy for children to draw, with an instantly recognisable silhouette and simple shapes. More interestingly, within the serial itself, the Daleks had been mocked by the show’s heroes: Ian showed children how to ‘play’ at being Daleks when he climbed into one of the casings and had fun altering his voice to be Dalek-like. The show itself undermined the implied horror of the creatures, allowing the children in the audience a way to accept the Daleks as monsters it was fun to be scared of.