Fifty Stories for Fifty Years: An Unauthorised Guide to the Highlights of Doctor Who: Guides to Comics, TV, and SF

An Unearthly Child

Let’s travel back to that time just after the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.

Given that the show only started in the last week of November, we don’t have much to choose from as far as stories from 1963 go. Luckily, the two that were broadcast that year, An Unearthly Child and the first few weeks of The Daleks, are both quite wonderful.

We’re going to look at An Unearthly Child mostly because we’ll get to see the Daleks on several other occasions, but there’s no other opportunity to see the programme before anyone knew what a Doctor Who story was.

A lot of people, when discussing this story, bring up the date it was broadcast. The original broadcast of episode one was on the 23rd of November 1963, the day after the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis.

In particular, people seem to have an urge to compare Doctor Who to Lewis’ greatest work - which is odd, because there are no explanations of the Nicene Creed at all in Who (well, other than an audio drama from a few years ago…). There is, however, a wooden box that takes the protagonists to other worlds, which is mildly similar to something in some obscure kids’ novel Lewis wrote.

I’m being slightly facetious (and in fact there is a great deal of similarity between Lewis’ preoccupations and some that the series would develop, especially when it comes to Plato) but one can just as easily find parallels in, for example, The Fantastic Four, whose first issue was published two years to the day before An Unearthly Child. An action man, a teenager who’s related to another member of the crew, and the girl one all end up having adventures as a result of being dragged off in a malfunctioning futuristic travel machine by an eccentric scientist who doesn’t understand people very well - that could just as easily sum up An Unearthly Child as the Fantastic Four’s origins.

Or, for that matter, one could point out that Steptoe and Son has a theme by Ron Grainer and opens in a junkyard, as An Unearthly Child does (and is written, like The Daleks, by ex-scriptwriters for Tony Hancock).

All this really means is that Doctor Who, when it started, was firmly of its time, and partook of the general culture that surrounded it. Which is not surprising when you consider the people who were making it.

Nowadays, early Who can look somewhat dated and staid, to those who aren’t accustomed to 60s TV, but it was being made by some of the hottest young talents of the time. Verity Lambert, the producer, was the youngest producer at the BBC, and Waris Hussein, who directed the first story, was the youngest director.

In fact, for something so often called ‘quintessentially British’, the production team was amazingly diverse. Lambert was the only female producer in TV at the time, as well as being the youngest, and she was one of the most competent (she’d once managed to rescue a live drama, and keep it going until the end, when the leading actor died half-way through the broadcast). Waris Hussein was gay and Indian, Sydney Newman (the executive in charge of the show, who helped create it) Canadian, Anthony Coburn (the writer of the first story) Australian and Carole Ann Ford (who played Susan, the Doctor’s grand-daughter) Jewish.

Which makes it all the more odd that the notoriously racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic William Hartnell was chosen for the lead role. But he was an inspired choice. Hartnell had previously mostly played tough-guy roles, and he revelled in the chance to break his typecasting, and was utterly spectacular.

Hartnell’s Doctor is a much more sinister, mysterious figure here than he was even in the next few stories, with a genuine air of menace, but he’s also recognisable as the character who would appear on our screens for the next twenty-six years. In fact, had the Doctor not started out as essentially the villain, as he is to all intents and purposes in this first story, he would undoubtedly have ended up being a much less complex character.

In particular, in an age when most actors on British TV were primarily theatrical, and played as if to the people in the back row, Hartnell’s performance is tight and enclosed. His famous fussing with his lapels is a very deliberate, clever acting choice - on a small screen, particularly the low-resolution screens of the time, actors have to work primarily in close-up, and so the only way to get any expressiveness from his hands was to keep them near his face as much as possible. It’s a wonderfully clever way to turn a technical limitation into a character point.

And much of Doctor Who in the early years was about precisely that, adapting technical limitations to the programme-makers’ advantage. This is particularly evident in An Unearthly Child, because Waris Hussein, who sadly only directed one more story for the programme, is one of the very best directors ever to work on Doctor Who, and he makes some absolutely inspired choices. The fluidity of the camera-work in this story is almost Wellesian at points, but what makes it really astonishing is when one realises these are essentially plays.

A lot of the criticisms raised against the ‘classic’ series come from people who are seeing the show with eyes that are adjusted to modern TV, which sees the Hollywood blockbuster rather than the RSC as the model to follow, but the ‘wobbly sets’ (which are a myth, although the sets do look cheap to modern eyes) are no more a hindrance to suspension of disbelief than having a cardboard tree in the middle of the stage in a production of Waiting for Godot – it’s an artistic suggestion of reality, rather than an attempt at accurate reproduction of the real world. TV when Doctor Who was broadcast originally was, in the UK at least, a branch of the theatre, not of the cinema.

In the early days, Doctor Who, like most TV, was done ‘as live’. There were multiple cameras in the studio, all recording constantly (a style of programme-making that is now confined to sitcom and soap opera, but was then the only way of making TV), and the actors performed the parts as if in a play, but with the cameras moving around them. Editing decisions were also made as live - the vision mixing would be done while the actors were performing.

In fact, in the whole first episode of An Unearthly Child there is only one moment we’d regard as an edit - when Ian and Barbara enter the TARDIS for the first time. That’s the only moment the cameras were stopped. Even then, it’s not an edit per se; the cameras are turned off and the tape stopped, then it’s started again once they’re inside the TARDIS. Actually editing the tape was far too expensive at that time (and in fact tape editing had only just been invented, by the Hancock’s Half Hour team).

But that means that every choice made by the director has to be made with an eye both to practicalities and to aesthetics, in a way it simply isn’t now. For example, Ian and Barbara have to be in a car at the beginning of one shot, but both have to talk to Susan in a classroom in the previous shots. There’s no way to do that with them on-screen - they can’t get from the classroom set into the car without stopping the cameras - so they’re voice-overs, and only Susan is shown.

But by doing this, by isolating Susan in the frame with no-one else around her, Hussein plays up her strangeness and difference, the very reason her teachers are investigating her.

The plotline actually has some incredibly sinister overtones for the first three-quarters of the episode – two teachers become concerned about one of their pupils, who is incredibly bright, and who seems to know more in some areas of science and history than her teachers, but who behaves very oddly, almost autistically at times, and who seems frightened of saying anything at all about her home life. The teachers follow her ‘home’, which turns out to be a telephone box in a junkyard, barely big enough for one person to stand up in. The box is locked, and the key is in the possession of a possibly dangerous old man.

The other three episodes in the storyline – involving the TARDIS crew getting involved with a tribe of cave people trying to figure out the secret of fire – are much less interesting (though visually stunning – they’re just let down by the leaden plotting and dialogue. Watching them with the sound turned off is far more interesting), but even they have some genuinely creepy moments, like the Doctor considering cold-blooded murder at one point. The Doctor would be humanised by his time with Ian and Barbara, but he remained an alien, with alien morals and values.

And it’s interesting to note that the cave-people’s response to the advanced technology of a box of matches precisely parallels the Doctor’s prediction of the twentieth century response to the TARDIS. The Doctor is to us as we are to sun-worshippers who don’t yet know the secret of fire. This makes the Doctor, even in his first appearance, an explicitly Promethean figure, although one who is reluctant to share his secrets. In this context it’s worth pointing out that the very first time we see the Doctor he’s lighting his pipe.

And of course, it’s impossible to discuss the effect of this first Doctor Who story without mentioning the theme music, credited to Ron Grainer but in all important respects the work of Delia Derbyshire. Again, this music still sounds experimental and different now – the effect back then, before the invention of the synthesiser, of this electronic noise with its echoes of Stockhausen and Varèse, must have been phenomenal.

Even had Doctor Who not gone on to become the TV staple it did, this first storyline, and in particular the first episode, would still be an all-time classic of TV. In fact, in many ways, it was all downhill from here – I can’t think, off the top of my head, of another single episode of the show that stands up in the way this one does.

The Aztecs

It might seem odd to viewers nowadays, but one of the rules Sydney Newman, the executive in charge of Doctor Who at its beginning, put into place was ‘no bug-eyed monsters’. This rule was, of course, broken as early as the second story, The Daleks, but it signified something about the intention of the show when it started – that it was to be at least partly an educational series.

This was the reason that the first two companions are a history teacher and a science teacher. The idea was that in stories set in the past, children would learn about history, and in the stories set in the future they’d learn about science.

The learning about science was very quickly dropped, not so much because they didn’t want to teach children about science as because they were incapable of it. This was the era of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures, and everyone involved in Doctor Who was definitely on the side of the Arts in that divide. David Whitaker, the script editor, seems to have believed that mercury was magic and that static electricity was evil [1] , and this ignorance was more or less continued by every writer and script editor since. Other than Christopher Bidmead and maybe Douglas Adams, it’s entirely possible that Doctor Who has never had a script editor who actually knew the difference between a solar system, a constellation, and a galaxy.

The history lessons, on the other hand, continued for a little longer. In the first three years there were nine stories which at least in part seemed intended to teach children about those bits of history everyone’s meant to know, in a 1066 And All That sort of way. These varied in accuracy and seriousness (The Romans is closer to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum or Up Pompeii than to I, Claudius) but generally involved the TARDIS crew getting involved in a Boys’ Own-style story with kidnappings and mistaken identities, while around them some important event from history happened (the French Revolution, the fall of Troy, the battle of Culloden).

These stories have no monsters, and no science fiction or fantasy elements apart from the TARDIS itself. It’s something the show did extraordinarily well, but which was dumped completely after Patrick Troughton’s second story (though Big Finish have done some very interesting audio stories in the genre).

John Lucarotti’s The Aztecs is one of the best of these stories, and the one that is most often referenced by other stories. In Doctor Who Magazine’s readers’ poll in 2009 ranking all two hundred stories then broadcast on the TV, it was the highest-rated historical story, and the top-rated First Doctor story not to feature Daleks or Cybermen. And with good reason – it’s an extraordinary piece of television.

It’s also extraordinarily problematical. For those who don’t know, the story is basically white people arrive in ‘primitive’ culture, think they know better than the natives how they should run their culture, mess up several people’s lives with their interference, then run off once they’ve got what they want.

It’s also rather horrific to have Barbara, supposedly an expert on the period, claim the only reason Cortés massacred the Mexica people is that they practiced human sacrifice. To put it mildly, this is attributing rather better motives to Cortés than he appears to have had.

So we have Barbara pretend to be an Aztec god and try to convince them to stop committing human sacrifice. Note that when I say this is a bad idea, I’m not actually defending human sacrifice – far from it. I just think that the history of rich white people who think they know better trying to impose their morality on cultures they don’t understand is one that has a few notable failures, though one has to make allowances for this being made in the 1960s, towards the end of Empire. The poor primitives didn’t know any better.

But this colonialist mindset distorts the whole story. Autloc, the High Priest Of Knowledge, is spoken of as intelligent and decent, when in fact he’s a credulous fool who is prepared to believe that Barbara is a god on no more than her own word. Meanwhile, Tlotoxl, the High Priest Of Sacrifice, is spoken of as evil, and is portrayed as, essentially, Laurence Olivier’s Richard III ramped up to eleven; hunchback, leer and all. Yet when one examines his actions, this is someone who tries to protect his religion and culture when a fraudster appears out of nowhere claiming to be a god and tries to destroy the fundamental basis of his religion. Barbara even admits to him, openly, that she’s a fraud, yet we’re supposed to be shocked that he wants rid of this blasphemer who is trying to destroy his society in order to save it [2] .

The one thing that saves this story from being a straight story of colonialism, and turns it into something rather stranger and rather better, is the Doctor. The Doctor’s opinions in the story are mostly there in order to explain why Barbara can’t succeed – we’re clearly meant to be sympathetic to Barbara’s wish to change history – but his famous argument that you can’t rewrite history, not one line! is in this case appropriate. The Doctor here is an anti-imperialist force. He’s against human sacrifice, but argues that it can’t be eradicated by outsiders coming in and trying to impose their will (in this case people from another time as well as another place). This is a Doctor who would have nothing to do with so-called ‘liberal interventionism’.

In fact The Aztecs seems weirdly ambiguous and confused on a lot of points, almost like it was the work of two writers – even down to the dialogue. The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan talk normally, and most of the characters speak in colloquial English when around them. But in any scene where the major characters aren’t present, the guest stars all start speaking in a pseudo-Shakespearean dialect, saying lines like A vision is with us and shall stand before them, and I in supplication to the rain-god shall offer human blood.

The Aztecs is one of the most theatrical of Doctor Who stories (something that’s emphasised in the special features on the DVD, where the actors talk about how it was recorded essentially as live, and how they were all used to working in rep), and like many Doctor Who stories prior to about 1980 it’s clearly inspired by a vague memory of what Shakespeare plays are like, being based around a clash of ideas but with plenty of soliloquising by the villain and people being pulled aside to have plot points explained to them in front of people who are not meant to be able to hear but clearly can. (Probably the last story in this mould was 1981’s The Keeper Of Traken. 80s Doctor Who was poorer for not having this style of story).

And in the tradition of this kind of play, there’s a love story based on a misunderstanding. While the Doctor’s engagement to Cameca is a miscommunication, it’s also very clear that the Doctor is extremely fond of her. Those who argue that the pre-1989 TV series didn’t handle emotion well, and this was something that was only introduced in 2005, are very wrong. The love subplot in this story is extremely moving, and is carried almost entirely by the facial expressions of William Hartnell and Margot Van der Burgh. That the Doctor doesn’t go into a long speech about how she’s the one woman he ever loved and no-one could possibly be as special as her with an orchestra swelling under him, before bursting into tears and spending the next six months in a sulk, is not a problem with this story but is to its credit. The 2005 series did not introduce emotions to Doctor Who, rather it introduced schmaltz, the enemy of real emotion.

The Aztecs is confused, but its very confusion saves it from being a bit of colonialist propaganda and pushes it into some very interesting places, and the central performances are wonderful (even John Ringham’s scenery-chewing as Tlotoxl). For a bit of children’s TV, done as a quick cheap one between two expensive stories with monsters in it, to hold up this well almost fifty years later is a minor miracle.

Dr Who and the Daleks

Doctor Who has always been primarily a TV show, but from almost the beginning it has been what we would now call multimedia. Very early on it stopped existing only on TV, and spread out into comics, books, theatre, records and more. I’ll be discussing these more once we get to the show’s cancellation in 1989, but as we’ve reached 1965, we should start with the most important of these.

Doctor Who and the Daleks, along with its sequel Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150, may well be the most-viewed piece of Doctor Who ever, appearing on British TV nearly every bank holiday from 1972 onwards – and for much of the sixteen years the show was off the air, it was the only Doctor Who that appeared on TV at all. Despite this, it has a bad reputation among Doctor Who fans.

The show’s second story, The Daleks by Terry Nation, had been the story that made the show the success it was. Children throughout the country had become obsessed with the Daleks, and after a follow-up, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, had aired close to Christmas 1964 (just in time for the launch of a line of toys), the Daleks had become a merchandising sensation unlike anything that had ever come from British TV.

And so the bug-eyed monsters that Sydney Newman had so wanted to avoid became the stars of the first wave of multimedia Doctor Who. They got their own comic strip in TV Century 21 magazine; their own book, The Dalek Book; a play, Curse Of The Daleks; and the first Dalek story became the subject of a range of adaptations - it became the first Doctor Who novel, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure With the Daleks (later reissued as just Doctor Who and