An Unearthly Child
(Season 1, Dr 1 with Ian Barbara and Susan, 23/11/1963-14/12/1963, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: David Whittaker, writer: Anthony Coburn, director: Warris Hussein)
Rank: 22
'Dear Mr Foreman, welcome to parent's evening and the review of your highly, erm, unique grand-daughter. Susan is a complete and rather baffling mix. Her use of science is...original, poetic even, but need to be more science and less fiction. Her history essays make you feel as if she was really there, though some of her facts are not how they were taught in the curriculum. In p.e. she hangs from the wallbars whimpering. Her art is full of colourful imaginative works on worlds with bright orange skies. Her languages, well, whatever they are they're all Greek to me. Maybe some after school classes with me as a private tutor in your home?...I know its probably small given where you live in a junkyard but I'm sure you can squeeze me in...No I'm not doing anything for the next century and I do enjoy travelling, why do you ask?...'
It’s November 1963 and a good man (impossibly old but with a young face) has fallen, attacked by ‘monsters’ for wanting to bring hope and change to the universe and make it a better place for all of us. Only, instead of changing faces and regenerating on the ground, the spirit of JFK turned into a TV show instead, broadcast the day after his death on November 23rd 1963 (and eighty seconds late due to a new bulletin). The universe will never be the same twice over. Because yes, we made it!!! Anniversary month is here at last and with it come the final crop of twenty-two Doctor Who stories. And now, thanks to the chameleon circuit that is the BBC i-player, we now have a new home that is bigger on the inside with practically all the roads travelled gathered together in one place. Well, I say practically all roads: typically one story that isn’t there is ‘An Unearthly Child’, the perfect introductory story that sets out just enough of Dr Who lore to make the series seem unlike anything else on television with just enough mystery to keep you transfixed and the perfect story to be reviewing as the i-player is launched. Typical – it seemed such a good idea a year ago back when the Whoniverse was still a twinkle in Russell T Davies’ eye and now here we are reviewing the only story nobody’s watching this morning. I must be the only Whovian glued to the DVD player rather than the i-player this morning. How did it end up being that way? Well it’s all a case of the BBC going back in time and asking ‘do I have the rights?’ And the first, now deceased story writer Anthony Coburn’s son Stef said ‘no’. Yes, it’s the first ever Dr Who controversy, arriving remarkably early if you’re reading this book in chronological order. From Stef’s point of view the BBC always undervalued his dad’s contribution to Dr Who history (this is the only story he ever wrote but he had another story finished that never got made), reckons the family got a paltry fee for it and blames the stress over the negotiations over royalties in the TV repeat/home video age as what killed his dad, so he has a right to feel aggrieved. Of course true Tardis blue Whovians know that the all-important first episode of this four parter had little to do nothing to do with Coburn anyway whatever the credits say (its generally accepted that it was by first script editor David Whittaker, recycling some ideas the initial person tasked with writing the first story, C E ‘Bunny’ Webber they’d agreed between them along the way, but rules inside the BBC meant only one writer ever got credited on a story at a time). Besides it was all a long time ago in a series that was never about money and all about bygones being bygones (or indeed Zygons); it’s such a shame for completists that such an important and obvious starting point as this story is missing.
That would matter less if
this was one of those opening stories that was all over the place and hadn’t
quite got going yet (how I feel about the first few stories of every other
scifi series I’ve ever seen from Star Treks original and Next Gen, Tomorrow
People, Blake’s 7 and, well, practically everything else out there) but it
isn’t: from the very first shot of the very first episode this story feels as
if it knows exactly what it’s doing, with a feel totally different to any other
series that had ever been made in 1963 (a bonus, perhaps, of the first episode
having been shot twice, the original version left in the vaults and unscreened
for more than a quarter century). But first let me take you back to the
beginning: no not 10,000 BC, at least not yet, but late 1962. Before then there
had only really been two British scifi series on TV and both of them,
‘Pathfinders In Space’ and ‘Quatermass’, were very much modelled on the
American idea of scifi as a big action packed series. From the first Dr Who has
a much more British feel from the first, a more homespun sense of wonder and
eccentricity where aliens aren’t something exotic to be fought by an army but
something to be outwitted, where the everyday becomes changed to become
extraordinary. So it’s a surprise to many people that Dr Who was the brainchild
of a Canadian and featured as its first writer an Australian. Sydney Wilson had
been hired all the way from Canada to add what newspaper reviewers liked to
call ‘flair’ to the BBC, with a track record of many television hits over at
ABC. ‘Pathfinders’ (1960-61) had been his brainchild, a children’s tale of kids
who sneak aboard the first rocket to leave the Earth (plus their pet, Hamlet
the Guinea Pig) that had proven to be a big hit and ran for four series (the
last three of which, miraculously, still exist). The series starred a lot of
names who will be in Dr Who over the next few years (including Gerald Flood –
King John in ‘The King’s Demons’,
George Colouris – Arbitan in ‘The Keys Of Marinus’
and in the first series, which went out live and sadly was never taped, Michael
Craze as one of the kids – companion Ben Jackson, while Malcolm Hulke – creator
of The Silurians and The Sea Devils amongst others – was its
regular writer). Noticeably tougher and scarier than your general early 1960s
children’s series (Andy Pandy, The Flowerpot Men, The Woodentops or the great
Rag Tag and Bobtail), Newman was particularly intrigued that Cambridge University
had run its own profile of the series, discussing why it had been such a hit.
He treasured their final report and even contributed a few quotes to it
himself, about why children were in many ways more TV literate and more
demanding than adult audiences and needed to be treated properly without being
patronised. Newman was also struck by how many children had watched with their
parents and gone to them for comfort, yet seemed to like being scared (and daft
as they might seem now, some of the cliffhangers about our ‘heroes’ possessed
or in almost-certainly deadly danger are a lot for young viewers who’d never
had to wait a week to continue stories before). Of course to most viewers in
the UK in 1963 scifi was purely for adults. Nigel Kneale’s ‘Quatermass’ had
been one of the breakout hits of the 1950s, adult and uncompromising with alien
invasions defeated only by an unflappable eccentric professor that was the one
person with the imagination to see the truth where the banks of soldiers
failed. It was a scary series even for adults, filled with effects that were so
out of this world the BBC had to build an entire department to cope with them
(the Radiophonic Workshop).
One of Newman’s first
tasks was to find a family slot to fill the gap when a lot of parents and
children were likely to be watching, in between Grandstand (which traditionally
finished at 5.15pm) and Juke Box Jury (which traditionally started at 5.45pm,
sometimes with the ‘Telegoon’ TV puppet adaptation of BBC’s radio hit ‘The Goon
Show’ at 5.40pm). So Newman got thinking: young children had watched
‘Pathfinders’ with their mums and dads – what about combining that with the
slightly older feel of ‘Quatermass’ for a slightly older teenage audience (one
magazine of the day reporting that Dr Who was aimed for ’11-14 year olds’,
although from the first Who was seen as a ‘family’ series rather than a
children’s one, made by the full drama department rather than the kiddies one).
Newman came up with the idea of a 754 wanderer in time and space who’d been
around so long he’d forgotten where he came from, getting around by use of an
‘everyday object’ and accompanied by three characters from different
generations that different members of the audience could relate to. In these
early days The Doctor was a brash grumpy alien who was very like Professor
Quatermass but less trustworthy and who would be of an obstacle than a
hero – more like Harcourt Brown, George
Colouris’ saboteur in ‘Pathfinders’, combined with the extra wisdom of both. In
these early days it was ambiguous whether The Doctor was an alien or an
Earthling time traveller from the future (eventually the series will decide on
the former, while the Peter Cushing film versions assumed the former) but
either way he was different to anything that had ever been seen on telly
before. Newman passed his idea over to
head of serials Donald Wilson who loved them and quickly put a crack team
together to make it, from tried and tested practitioners who’d been at the BBC
years: Australian Rex Tucker, technical advisor (and creator of the
teleprompter) Mervyn Pinfield and designer Peter Brachiaki Between them they added more
details: the other companions (writer Coburn adding the detail that Susan was
the Doctor’s grand-daughter), the format of going forward and backwards in time
and the basics behind the Tardis. However none of them really gelled and the
series, intended to be on air in August 1963, fell badly behind. Tucker,
especially, complained repeatedly about being stuck on a rubbish kid’s show,
while the designer got as far as the Tardis interior before being begged to be
removed to something better suited to him. But Newman wouldn’t quit: he figured
he’s just hired the ‘wrong’ people. He got lucky with three new members of
staff. He was closest to Verity Lambert, who’d worked as his assistant at ABC
and the pair had got on partly because she was the one person who would stand
up to him and tell him he was wrong. Feeling the new series needed less yes men
and someone ‘full of piss and vinegar’ Newman hired her, despite her protests
that she’d never produced television before. She was also an outsider, snubbed
by many at the BBC for being young (only twenty-seven), from ‘commercial
television’ and most of all for being female (there had never been a woman
producer at the BBC before). Verity was the first person hired to work on the
show who actually believed in it and quickly put her own stamp on it – hiring
staff of her own and her own actors. She also hired another BBC outsider,
Warris Hussein, a twenty-five-year old trainee who was also looked down on for
daring to be young and Indian (the first director of colour at the BBC). So it
was that Dr Who became a melting pot, made by younger people with a different
view to most television (which was still very much being made by ex-stage
directors in 1963) and with a ‘younger’ more 1960s feel than anything else on
telly (and another reason it so annoys me seeing trolls say Dr Who became
‘woke’ when it got a female Doctor: in context of the times it has never been
more ‘woke’ than it was in 1963, behind the scenes and in front of it, with
Barbara a companion who’s an authority figure as a schoolteacher and who gives
as good as she gets).
One person Verity didn’t
appoint but who arrived at around the same time was script editor David
Whittaker. Her polar opposite in many ways he was older, more thoughtful, shy
and reserved but had an unabashed love of science-fiction and history and most
of all had a big imagination he’d never really been able to use (till now his
biggest hit had been the very different ‘Compact’, a soap opera set inside a
woman’s glossy magazine). While Verity concentrated on personnel and casting
Whitaker wrote out an eight page plan of what the series was ‘about’, which
drew all of Newman’s ideas together and added a few, such as two com[anions
being schoolteachers and the Tardis itself. Newman was happy to see people
working on his idea so enthusiastically and let them do what they liked without
too much supervision, although he warned against too many ‘bug eyed monsters’
and pushed for the series to be ‘educational’ (which it is, for the first four
stories at least). As much Sydney Newman has got credit for the birth of this
show over the years really Who was a collaborative project from the first and
all the better for it, a young and hungry but nervous and untested production
team who nevertheless between them took so many risks they didn’t need to take
in order to make this show both the best it could possibly be and utterly
unlike anything TV had ever seen before or since.
It might yet have fallen
apart with the wrong casting, with actors and actresses who figured they were
doing a kiddie’s programme that at first was on trial and only due to run for
thirteen weeks, but the production team get them all spot on. Rex Tucker had
initially planned for The Doctor to be a younger man in makeup, hoping to cast
his pal stage actor Hugh David and
turning to Leslie French, Cyril Cusack and Geoffrey Balydon in quick succession
who all turned it down. Verity though wanted a ‘real’ old man and figured she
knew just the man to do it. William Hartnell had never played a part like this
in his life before – he tended to pay authority figures, most of them sergeant
majors, but he’d fallen into them by accident. He’d got into acting because he
loved Silent Movies and wanted to be a comedian like his idol Charlie Chaplin
and had been nagging his agents to get him ‘different’ parts. His favourite one
so far was as a rugby talent scout in ‘This Sporting Life’, which happened to be
on TV in late 1962 and Hartnell’s performance as Johnson (he never gets a first
name – he’s that sort of as character) had so impressed Verity with its mixture
of brusqueness and kindness, the sort of person who treated the boys in his
care sternly but clearly with a twinkle in the eye behind his remarks.
Hartnell’s agent rang with the offer of a character ‘with long hair who travels
in time and space and is a little bit around the bend’ and Hartnell couldn’t
say yes quick enough. Dr Who’s original fanboy, he believed in this series when
no one else did, ticked people off for dumbing down in making it a ‘kid’s show’
and boosted morale when everyone else got nervous. There’s a tale that he heard
Eileen Way, the actress playing the ‘old woman’ in the serial, saying the show
would never ever last the year and bet her a fiver it would last five years or
more (sadly they never met again so he never got his winnings, which was a lot
in those days when an entire story only cost £2300). Hartnell is the only person
you could ever imagine playing the 1st Doctor and was such a hard act to follow
having anyone else play him was all but unthinkable three years later (see ‘The Tenth Planet’).
Verity cast William
Russell first, as an experienced safe pair of hands who knew TV backwards and
had a following as a TV heartthrob after playing the lead role in ‘The
Adventures Of Sir Lancelot’ (which is like a more fun but more one-dimensional
version of ‘The Crusade’). He’s perfect
casting, with just the right mixture of innocence and experience,
simultaneously out of his depth and confident enough to take charge and
improvise. Carole Ann Ford as Susan was Warris Hussein’s suggestion, invited to
audition after he caught her in the film of ‘The day Of The Triffids’ (where
she’s about the best thing in it). Carole was intrigued by the original plans,
sadly toned down, to have her character properly alien – at first she was a
Royal princess from a distant planet being accompanied by The Doctor before
Coburn turned her into a relative, but even in re-writes she was meant to be
more alien, other-worldly, feisty and telepathic (like an Avengers girl with
added ESP). It was Newman who had the part re-written to make her slightly more
‘identifiable’ but even so, Susan is gloriously strange at times and never
better than here where she manages to be so much more interesting than any
teenager had ever been allowed to be on screen, not a one dimensional rebel
without a cause, or an innocent schoolgirl but something intriguingly in
between. Barbara was the hardest to cast and joined late in the day after
Verity got chatting to distinguished director Alvin Rakoff at a party for TV
executives and he said his acting wife sounded just right for the part. She is
too: Barbara is my favourite of these early characters, a no-nonsense stern
teacher who still manages to be warm, emotional and protective, with an
imagination and intuition the others don’t have. She really is the best of us,
with a cool head in situations that I know would make all my school teachers
run away and Who’s first feminist icon (seriously, compare Barbara to every
other female on TV in 1963: she’s awesome and Jacqueline Hill plays her perfectly).
The four characters are the perfect ‘generational’ mix: everyone watching in
the ‘family’ audience Newman wanted had someone to identify with and uniquely
Dr Who takes it in turns to side with them: the Grandfather alien who’s
impossibly knowledgeable and bright, the Grand-daughter who’s so grownup in
some ways and just a kid in others and the two middle aged school-teachers, the
sort of people audiences in 1963 have grown up being told to respect and yet
who are our eyes and eyes, often at a loss as to what’s going on. If the 1960s
stories of Who are, as I’ve said elsewhere in this book, a safe space for
discussion between the generations who fear what the future might be when the
baby boomers grow into adults then it’s perfect that this first story sides
with everyone in turn. After all, Ian and Barbara break into the Tardis out of courage and concern, traits the Doctor
himself will come to embody most over time.
Ah but that’s in the
future: for now part of the fun is that we don’t know who The Doctor is and
he’s set up in this first instalment as an anti-hero, an obstacle who gets in
the way rather than the brave adventurer saving people. That is perhaps the
biggest change between then and now (with The Doctor’s character gradually
softened, firstly from the Pilot to the transmitted version, then in
Whittaker’s ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ and
then ‘The Sensorites’): otherwise
the remarkable thing is that everything else is present and correct and
November 1963 Who is recognisable to viewers at any time between then and now. All
journeys start with a single step, even ones through time and space. While
people still talk with shock about how many things second story ‘The Daleks’ created in one go, in many ways
the first story is even more extraordinary. For this story introduces four main
characters (two of whom are aliens quite unlike any aliens that have ever been
on TV before now, recognisably like us yet distinctly otherworldly), the
concepts of travel in time and space (to this day scifi programmes have one or
the other concept but never both except for random one-off episodes inspired by
this show!) and a substitute home of a blue box that’s bigger on the inside
than the outside (utterly unique – as the ‘About Time’ books put it, C S Lewis
on the outside, H G Wells on the outside), all ideas that seem impossible now
whenever you talk about them to someone whose never seen the show before, but
which seemed utterly unfathomable sixty years ago at a time when there was
nothing else to compare them to. What’s even more extraordinary than that,
though, is how much of this debut story is already sprinkled with the magical
pixie dust that runs through this series to this day sixty years on, the sense
that Dr Who can go anywhere and do anything and that once this series has
hooked its claws into you you’ll never be able to look at the universe the same
way again.
Nowadays every new series
of Dr Who has to re-sell its main points to a new audience, especially when a
new companion, Doctor or especially a new showrunner takes over to push the
series into a whole new area, the frisson for old hands being how they’re going
to make each successive arrival different to the last one, particularly when
companions stumble across the Tardis for the first time and have to get up to
speed with what the audience at home knows super quickly (some are hilarious:
Tegan especially learns in a two minute scene everything it took us viewers eighteen
years to understand). This time though is the first time we get to do a lot of
the things we’ll tale for granted later and so this story has to sell the
concept to us at speed. Sensibly this story does that at length, so we get to
feel just how extraordinary this premise is. We spend a whole episode following
Ian and Barbara into the Tardis and its a masterstroke making them our eyes and
ears as the Doctor’s extraordinary world crashes head-first into their ordinary
one so that our curiosity is piqued along with theirs. It’s an even bigger
masterstroke making young Susan, the automatic character identification point
for the intended children’s audience watching at home, as other-worldly as her
Dr-Grandad so that instead of being the ‘ignorant us’ she’s the ‘other-worldly
them’. Susan is the antagonist around which most of this first story revolves,
as reflected by the title (not that Dr Who stories even had overall titles on
screen back then, one of the small handful of things that got changed later –
this story and the next two are known by a wide variety of different names
depending on the different drafts submitted to the BBC on the paperwork,
mentioned in the Radio Times or adopted by future Dr Who biographers, but to
the people working on them at the time the first three years of Dr Who are
really just referred to by their production codes behind the scenes or ‘the one
about the…’ in the school playgrounds. Still ‘An Unearthly Child’, the name of
the first episode erroneously used by the Radio Times to describe the whole
story in their tenth anniversary special, is such a perfect name that it’s
stuck – and the alternate names ‘The Tribe Of Gum’ or ‘1000,000BC’ are either
boring or wrong).
Susan is someone maddeningly
bright and with more knowledge than her teachers in all sorts of ways and
irritatingly ignorant of 1960s London in other ways, so that even from the
first this series balances the war between ‘elders’ and ‘youngsters’ that will
run through so many of the 1960s stories, about who is best suited to being in
charge (as we’ve seen in a few other reviews now this is a show made by an
institution even in the 1960s that was firmly seen as ‘old school’, but from an
idea created by a young hotshot from Canada in Sydney Newman and given to an
even younger producer and director to make as their big breaks into TV).
Susan’s the ultimate in ‘exchange students’, sampling ‘our’ culture to add to
her knowledge and she’s recognisable to anyone who’s ever rubbed shoulders in a
classroom with anyone from abroad: she’s been taught by a different curriculum
with a different emphasis on things, so that her science in particular far
outstrips anything the teachers know which gives her a wisdom beyond her years
(and a firsthand knowledge of history that allows her to openly criticise the
history books) and yet who’s utterly ignorant of the cultural norms the other
pupils talk about. It’s just that Susan isn’t just coping with having moved in
space to an alien land, like so many exchange students, but in time as well. No
wonder she has trouble fitting in and no wonder why her teachers are so worried
about her– and yet the very fact that she wants to be an ordinary teenager in
our time (well, on first viewing anyway) and can’t is what makes her so
identifiable to everyone whose ever felt lost or unable to fit in (something Dr
Who still does so well: even when it became as big as it ever was circa 1973-76
and again in 2005-2008, its remained identifiably a cult programme for outsiders
and misfits who don’t tend to like what everyone else is watching. Another
reason having our own tiny space on the i-player feels so ‘right’, even for
fans like me who’ve bought this stuff a dozen times over down the years).
This isn’t just a joke on
her teachers’ relative ignorance of what she knows though; Ian and Barbara are
the sort of people every adult at home watching in 1963 either looked up to or
wanted to be: resourceful, intelligent, calm, curious and brave. While,
frankly, they’re too nice to be teachers most of the audience would recognise
from the days of corporal punishment taught mostly by scarred WW2 veterans,
they needed to be someone audiences at home would trust and educated enough to
walk into this new world of impossible things from a place of some knowledge.
The frisson of Dr Who’s first two seasons is that we must be somewhere truly
unknown if even these two – the height of everything good about British
educational standards in 1963 - are out of their depth. And yet for all their education,
for all their wisdom, for all their traditional position of power over
children, what this series does so brilliantly is show how ignorant they still
are compared to the alien Dr and his grand-daughter and how, in the infinity of
the cosmos, mankind is a very small cog indeed. That’s a major strand the
series is till pulling on today and while the Doctorr’s become friendlier and
learned to admire the Earthlings he bumps along with (he identifies with them
far more than his own people most of the time) Dr Who is still recognisably
about looking at the Earth from an outsider’s alien eyes, pointing out the
places where humans are lacking, how we need to improve ourselves and how mad a
lot of our manmade customs truly are to anyone who hasn’t been brought up on
them. No wonder Susan gets so many of them wrong: in the first episode alone
she points out the stupidity over how pre-decimal currency works on a planet
where most people went decimal long ago (it still amazes me that the production
team guessed Britain’s move to decimal currency right, eight years after
broadcast so Susan is only a little bit out), the ignorance of scientists who
don’t include time as a dimension alongside space in their calculations and who
spend their spare talking about a past they can never personally experience
when they could be enjoying Swinging London in the present and embrace the pop
music of ‘John Smith and the Common Men’ (for in 1963 nothing reeked of ‘the
present’ more than pop music, except perhaps Susan’s specially made Vidal
Sassoon hairdo. The hairdresser being asked to come up with something ‘just a
little ahead of fashion’).
The biggest change from
then to what we know and love, ironically, is the character who stayed the
longest and is still there now. There’s a great line in Steven Moffat’s 2007
Children In Need spin-off ‘Time Crash’ (which, if you were to count it as a
‘proper’ story would very much be in my top 50, probably around this number of
#22, it’s such a sweet love-letter to the past from one fan to other fans)
about how ‘back then I was always trying to be old and grumpy and important –
like you do when you’re young’. That’s not how the 1st Dr is sold to us back in
1963 though. For a start he’s not the 1st Dr, he’s The Dr, because we don’t
know about regeneration yet. He’s meant to be impossibly old and experienced,
not someone in their first century’s flush of youth from a race who can live
more or less forever (‘barring accidents’) and who now seems to us in
retrospect more like Susan or Romana to come, someone whose read every book
there is to know but isn’t yet experienced (especially when it comes to
interacting with people) and not that well-travelled, totally clueless as to
what to do when two schoolteachers stumble onto his secret of space travel. He’s
very different in these early days, a monster every bit as alien and
frightening as any our heroes meet, and yet without him the series is over:
perhaps the other single biggest change in the entire show from ‘then’ and
‘now’ is that this story goes from being about the horrors of being trapped
away from your own time, possibly for good, endlessly trying to get back to
your own ordinary lives and how important they still are even in a universe
this big to being about exploring the universe because you can be home in time
for tea. For now the Doctor is shifty, angry, defensive, untrusting, devious
and sneaky – the sort of things the Doctor will take down dictators and whole
regimes for once he gets into his stride. It takes being around people as intrinsically
good as Ian and Barbara to smooth his hard edges down and the earliest ‘story
arcs’ in the series (not that anyone was thinking in those terms back in 1963 –
most people making this were amazed it got to the end of a year without being
cancelled) isn’t just how Ian and Barbara grow to cope with their new
circumstances but how much the Doctor’s alien coldness thaws to match them.
This is a series about learning in so many ways, Dr Who creator Sydney Newman’s
only real remit for the series being that it should be ‘educational’ –
something that fades as soon as The Daleks and alien evil monsters end up being
what this story is ‘about’, but is very much a part of the series ethos
throughout.
Certainly Dr Who was a
learning curve for everyone making it and there were a few sticking points
along the way. The August starting date got pushed back to October and a
concerned Sydney Newman decided they should shoot a ‘pilot’, just to check the
ideas were working (one unseen on TV until as late as 1991 in a ‘theme night’
for the anniversary of Lime Grove studios, since made available in wildly
different edits on the ‘Hartnell Years’ VHS, ‘The
Edge Of Destruction’ VHS and the ‘Unearthly Child’ DVD). Around 90% of the
story is the same but there are key differences, changes made after Newman saw
the edit and demanded everyone do it again (pushing the transmission date
further to November): a thunderclap sound at the start of the theme tune; Susan
absent-mindedly drawing a Rosarch blot rather than disputing facts about The
French Revolution; The Doctor’s more 1960s suit and tie which is swapped for a
more Edwardian costume (in keeping with Hartnell’s real age and hinting at the
golden age of science fiction novels); the Tardis layout which is untidier (and
changes anyway between episodes one and four of the broadcast version, while
the Tardis crew are out, though nobody comments on it!), The Doctor and Susan’s
background is originally more precisely (Susan mentions coming from the 49th
century) but is made more ambiguous and changed to ‘another tie, another world’),
while various mistakes such as William Russell knocking into a camera and
stagehands desperately trying to close the malfunctioning tardis doors get
ironed out. The characters too are tweaked, The Doctor is made less alien and
obnoxious, throwing more insults at the teachers in the pilot and even snarling
at Susan for being a ‘stupid girl’, while the Tardis is more deliberately
dematerialised (in the finished version it seems to be a bluff, that Susan
ruins by grabbing at The Doctor and knocking him into the controls) while Susan
is more alien and weird. Something that pleased Hartnell no end (he wanted his
Doctor to be nicer) but annoyed Carole (who wanted Susan to be more than just a
schoolgirl; sadly the character will never be as interesting as he is in the
first episode again). Newman’s nervousness made other people nervous too, to
the point where the BBC decided to bury the series, with only a single short
radio advert (with William Hartnell as himself, sadly since lost) and half a
page in the Radio Times (originally it was hoped to have the front cover, nut
Kenneth Horne got that instead). Gicven the new producer, untested director and
inexperienced script editor most people at the BBc expected it to be a colossal
failure: only Sydney Wilson, the unsung hero of the era, and his enthusiasm
pushed it over the line at all and even then with contracts for just thirteen
weeks in case it needed to be pulled. Some would say the BBC has been reacting
the same way ever since, at least until 2006-08 when it was the BBC’s golden
boy at last, the way it should always have been! I can see why these changes
were made but I still think I prefer the pilot version: it’s even more mysterious
and plays more for shock, whereas the ‘remake’ is a little more in line with
other TV on the air in 1963.
Even so, the finished
edition of episode one is one of the greatest twenty-five minutes in the
series, even today nearly a thousand on. There are several great moments in the
opening episode to keep you hooked whatever demographic you’re from: that
opening which like so many 1960s stories starts like an ordinary TV series
everyone can recognise (Dixon of Dock Green, with a policeman – the first person
ever seen in the series - patrolling his beat not knowing what’s really sitting
in the junkyard) before turning extraordinary, Ian and Barbara exploring the
junkyard in Totter’s lane in the dark (a clever way of explaining why the Dr
and Susan don’t have a house but still have somewhere they live, un-noticed),
Susan’s peculiar range of knowledge (we don’t know at first that she’s an alien
– if you hadn’t read the Radio Times she could just as easily be a foreign
princess, especially with that hairdo) and above all the mystery of why a
police telephone box is sat in the corner, humming (back in the days when it
was an unusual rather than impossible sight in 1963: every child watching this
on first broadcast at least knew what a polixe box was even if they hadn’t seen
one, a place to call for help in case of an emergency; early plans were to
change the exterior wherever it went, but as early as episode two budget
constraints mean that the Doctor is complaining of a faulty chameleon circuit
that gets stuck and which he’ll only repair, briefly, in 1984, before it gets
stuck again: it’s the perfect choice, suggesting both a sort of last-gasp
cavalry coming to help humanity when most needed – a lot of the early
historicals particularly are about trying to put things right for ‘ordinary
people’ who are pretty extraordinary when you get to know them - and again
being an outsider who never quite fits in). Most memorable of all, though, is
the Tardis being bigger on the inside: something stories cover in a few seconds
now when they need to bring the characters up to speed with what we know but
which goes on for several minutes back then, as Ian and Barbara look round it,
in shock, talking about how impossible it is that something so extraordinary is
in a place so ordinary. As for that all important first ever cliffhanger, it’s
a classic if you somehow come to these stories in order (more unlikely than
ever now worst luck, but still); the Tardis takes off, knocking the human
passengers unconscious through g forces (just as space travel would), to a
swirl of impossible effects and radiophonic workshop noises all of which are
unlike anything anyone watching would have seen before and really does feel as
if it’s being beamed in from the future (even now it’s that timeless sort of
view of the future you get a lot in music from the psychedelic era but four
years earlier than even that). All this will get shrunken in future
stories, reduced to a killer line (usually some variation on ‘it’s bigger on
the inside’) and the central column going up and down (it was originally meant
to rise up with flashing lights turning on before the budget restrictions got
in the way. My theory is that the Tardis needs to stretch its legs after five
whole months in one place – the longest it ever spends anywhere besides UNIT HQ
in the Pertwee/UNIT years and the 12th Doctor’s confession dial in ‘Hell Bent’).
The Tardis, a concept
created by Newman, turned into a police box by Coburn (who was asked for a ‘disguise’
purely for the 1963 scenes and passed one out on a walk) and embellished by
Whittaker, is a brilliant conception inside and out, a spaceship that’s an
ordinary everyday object and which a franchise that’s more down-to-Earth than
other scifi series. The idea for the ship was then handed to designer Ray
Cusick (with some ideas by his predecessor Peter Brachacki), who put his first
draft on a napkin in his lunch break so the story goes and handed it to outside
contractors Shawcroft when he’d drawn up his plans (they’ll be providing all
sorts of weird and wonderful things for the show into the 1970s), recognisably
space-age and yet utterly unlike a rocketship which would have been the obvious
way to go in the era of the space race; for my money its early home-from-home
with exotic roundels on the wall and a hexagonal control panel that goes up and
down is still the best Tardis design across sixty years, for all the many wild
and wonderful things that have been added to it since. There’s nothing a child
of 1963 would have expected to see: no chairs, no panels resembling a computer,
just a central column (worked by a bicycle chain!) and panels. In time
Whittaker will make the Tardis so much more than just transport: it’s a second
home, a safe haven of refuge in extraordinary lands. Yet unlike other American
scifi series where things always work perfectly it’s fragile, sensitive, hard
to control. It helps emphasise that The Doctor is far from the superhero of
other series, when he struggles to work it and refuses to read the manual the
same way your dad refuses to understand how his new car works. In time the
Tardis will even be ‘alive’, or at least sentient enough to communicate with
The Doctor and companions in its own way (see the glorious ‘Edge Of Destruction’ in two stories’ time,
where Whittaker really indulges in writing for his favourite part of the
series, in a story that’s four near-strangers trapped in a lift the size of
infinite dimensions). The design is wonderfully timeless too: it looked as
strange and weird in 1963 as it does today, with a hexagonal pattern that makes
it look like a beehive. It looks impossibly futuristic yet also something that
could plausibly exist just with science that hasn’t been discovered yet, with
dimensions that are bigger on the inside than the outside that allows it to
land and blend in anywhere.
The part of this story
before Ian and Barbara enter the Tardis still feels recognisably like other
British TV shows of 1963. The first ever shot of the series is a policeman
walking past, just like the most famous show of all back then, Dixon of Dock
Green, which is this show’s antithesis for now all about the safety of being
amongst a warm authoritarian presence who knows what they’re doing, even if in
the future the Dr does end up a sort of intergalactic policeman putting things
right; while the setting is a junkyard just like the era’s second biggest hit
‘Steptoe and Son’, Galton and Simpson’s ‘rebound’ series after being sacked
from Hancock’s Half Hour by its star, to be replaced by future Dr Who writers
Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner amongst others, but after Ian and Barbara enter
the Tardis? Not a chance: no matter how many times I’ve seen it the thrill of
them pushing through the Tardis doors in ‘our’ world (from one set) and into
the interior (in another: all Hartnell Dr Whos and come to that pretty much all
British telly was shot in two because editing film was so expensive back then)
and finding themselves in another, is still unbelievably exciting, one of the
most perfect moments in all telly anywhere. And the biggest thrill of all? If
the Tardis can change shape and can land in London at the time of broadcast
then it could be anywhere near the viewer. This is a series that can go
anywhere and do anything –and the first place the Tardis happens to go is right
back into our past to cavemen days(or at least that’s what you’re meant to
think anyway…)
As early as the second
episode when Australian writer Anthony Coburn took over people, especially
newspaper reviewers, have been saying that the series isn’t like the olden days
and has gone a bit downhill (The Guardian saying that the show had ‘fallen off
badly’). The view from most fans still goes ‘nice opening story, shame about
the rest’ and admittedly going from all that intellectual debate about ‘us’ and
‘them’ to three episodes of cavemen in furs grunting is a bit of a shock. But I
love these three episodes too, in a different sort of way: it’s important that
this series show from the first just how wide and elastic the DW format can be
– going back in time to last Tuesday or popping down to the shops wouldn’t cut
it, but going back to the stone age? Fab. If they can do that then what can
they possibly do next week? Dr Who is still trading off that excitement that
keeps you watching to one extent or another – even now, 335 stories down, it
still feels like a concept we’ve barely scratched the surface of. It fits the
opening episode too rather than just being merely tagged on: the first episode
is all about how even our brightest and best from the 1960s seem primitive to
the Doctor, of wondering why he’s so aloof when our time surely isn’t that
different to his? Well, now we see things from The Doctor’s point of view as even
the brightest and bravest cavemen seem primitive to Ian and Barbara, who
realise how they must look to the Dr and Susan. Even the Tardis, as impossible
as it seems, is sold to us as science from a future more advanced than ours –
it’s not as big a leap as, say, making fire was to mankind, the moment
generally recognised by most archaeologists as the ‘starting point’ for
civilisation that changed everything about how we treated ourselves and our
environment. Fire created communities, allowed Humanity to cook food for
nutrients that made him smarter and the energy to run after more meat as well
as keeping predators away. Fire was the thing that separated us from our monkey
ancestors, the building blocks of intelligence that all future generations have
built on (some more than others given the amount of baboons who seem to be in
power in our day and age, but still). It’s still something scientists use to
learn from (and powers the Bunsen burners seen in Ian’s lab). Now, after 25
minutes of the impossibly new in the present day we get to see where things
started, with the 1960s merely one dot on the line between the stone age and
the Doctor’s time.
It’s also a clever means
of showing how times never change until humanity does, as these characters
create friction by rubbing along each other like Ian’s sticks of wood, clashing
and trying to find compromises in a way almost all future Dr who stories will. For
the real difference is that the Tribe of Gum, presumably all relatives of each
other, are at risk of dying out because they continue to act like strangers. By
contrast the Tardis crew are four strangers who have to learn to put their
differences aside and work together for the benefit of their mutual survival. Which
might have struck viewers in 1963 as familiar. For, like almost all ‘classic’ Who stories from the 20th
century, this story is being made against the background of a cold war where
America and Russia could both press the nuclear button at any time (it’s worth
remembering that the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the hottest moment of the
cold war, was almost precisely a year old when the first episode of this story
went out, Things haven’t changed one little bit: ‘tribes’ are still squabbling
over resources and technology that they wanted to give them an edge over their
rivals the way the cavemen do here, Za and Kal the super-powers competing for
control of the mysterious new technology of fire. What’s more the rockets that
in 1963 are being sent into space through the cold war competition could only
take off because of the invention of fire, with pictures everywhere in 1963 of
turbo thrusters and fire trailing out the back as they defied the Earth’s
gravity, something that could never have happened without that first step of
fire.Interestingly, given what’s to come, the ‘moral’ of this story is that
‘the tribe is stronger when everyone works together’, which might make it the
most Communist-friendly bit of TV of the whole 1960s as The Doctor and co
overthrow Kal, the series’ first tyrant, who took power by strength and killing
the vulnerable, paying the penalty by being kicked out the tribe (equally The
Doctor is apparently trying to kill Ka so they can escape until Ian stops him,
a hangover from the early days of him being a shifty, untrustworthy soul – he seems
to take the advice about community being stronger to heart from now on though).
Like the first episode, too, it’s a struggle between generations, with three
different ages who all get their turn in the spotlight to talk about their need
for power. Those 10,000 years haven’t changed a thing: the inventions are
bigger and more complex and the tribes are now nationalist counties divided by
oceans but the same tensions and the same grabs for power still exist. What’s
more it’s simply assumed by everyone that this is the Earth’s distant past.
What if this isn’t Earth but some other planet? There’s nothing to deny it
(though it does seem strange that neither Ian or Barbara comment on different
star configurations given how there must have been clear nights with no
industrial pollution to block out the stars; then again they are having a very
trying day). Then again what if this is Earth’s future? For it’s a sad fact
that the fire that gives life can kill, even in 1963 when harnessed into atomic
bombs. Had the nuclear bomb been dropped then mankind’s future might well have
looked like this, with enough generations passed for civilisation to crumble
and people to forget. And this is a species that have ‘forgotten’ the secret of
fire, not one that never knew it.Whatever the setting in space or time,
already, in its first story, Dr Who is making a wider political point about the
present day and ‘An Unearthly Child’ sets the moral tone for a lot of what’s to
follow (at least until second story ‘The
Daleks’ goes all macho and warlike with its put-down of pacifists; the
question of whether any squabble was worth fighting over is key to the whole of
the 1960s, as a generation grow up on war stories from their parents and
grandparents and shy away from treating them like automatic heroes). In some
ways it’s like a darker, more tragic of ‘The Flintstones’, the hit American
1960s cartoon that had made the stone age ‘cool’ – only instead of them being
like us, with inventions made out of stone, it’s mankind that hasn’t learned a
thing and is just as triabl and stupid as ever. Coal Hill School in London in
1963 is really part of an interconnected point in time in human evolution from
our earliest days to our possible futures: it’s that key concept of this series
these opening episodes sell so well.
Although admittedly that
does mean putting up with a lot of monosyllabic grunting from people with hairy
chests for three episodes (the actors for this episode were cast as much for
being hairy as for their acting skills!) who by rights shouldn’t be able to
speak even this well (there was a lot of debate about Anthony Coburn’s script
and how educated to make the cavemen, but in the end the production team
settled for a halfway house, where they would be clever enough to be understood
by the audience but not so clever they were just men from RADA talking in
received pronunciation). Some fans have been critical of this approach and the
production team received letters of protest almost immediately, especially the cavemen
talking and having a ‘patriarchal society’ like the 1960s (with Whittaker
replying that nobody really knew anything this far into the past and he’d taken
a certain amount of ‘artistic license to tell a better story. Not the last time
that plea will be used. The irony is that nobody on the series in sixty years
of adventures was more meticulous a researcher than Whittaker, but there just isn’t
any – not concrete history anyway). There are times, especially when the
cavemen are grunting to each other, that the story is hard to follow and it
doesn’t help that these characters are all so ruthless and unlikeable, from the
young Za plotting to overthrow the weakened elder Kal to the cackling old woman
complaining it isn’t like it was in the olden days. The last three episodes
certainly aren’t as good as the first, becoming the first of many a Dr Who
story padded out with being escapes and captured. Had this story lived up to
the first episode it would be in my top five for sure, maybe even #1. However
for the most part it works: this isn’t a culture who have absolutely nothing –
they have enough comparative warmth, safety and culture as to not want to risk
losing it. However, they don’t settle there: they take risks, killing for fire
because they know it will help their communities step forward. ‘An Unearthly
Child’ is really a game of curiosity, of poker: do you stick or twist? Do you
risk losing the relative safety of what you already have to take a giant leap
into the unknown, or do you play safe and stop there? The curiosity that drives
the Doctor, that caused Barbara and Ian to follow Susan home, is here in these
cavemen who are just bright enough to know what doors fire will unlock for
them. That lesson remains though: everyone needs to learn to make fire, so that
the knowledge isn’t hoarded by one being for power over the others, otherwise
the secret will die out when they do.
I do think that fans
underestimate episodes 2-4 simply because of how god the first is: it looks
highly impressive considering its being shot in a tiny cramped TV studio in
Lime Grove (with lots of close-ups, to cover up just how cramped and tiny these
sets are), the acting is first rate (especially Derek Newark’s increasingly
desperate Za and Eileen Way’s ‘Old Woman’ – her actual on-screen credit even
though she was all of fifty-two at the time and three years younger than
William Hartnell – is the first of many knowledgeable outsiders who give the
best advice that would have solved the plot much quicker only people never
listen to them, another long running theme of the series). Coburn is an
under-rated writer I think with lots of neat little touches in the dialogue
that sound both basic and profound (such as Tala’s comment that ‘the beast took
away your axe in it’s head’ and The Doctor’s wistful ‘fear makes companions of
us all’) and some clever ideas (Tala, who has never had any reason to
understand the concept in a fight for survival, misunderstands and thinks The
Doctor’s tribe is ‘friend’. Although that is more in keeping with any number of
Whittaker’s stories so both might be inventions of the script editor). It’s a
shame he never wrote for the series again: he was meant to, but his next script
‘The Masters Of Luxor’ poked fun at organised religion and in 1963 that was the
one thing they really couldn’t do. Verity asked for a re-write and Coburn
basically told her to get lost (so much for the community being bigger than the
person…) Certainly it’s a better introduction than the original intention, CE
Webber’s ‘The Giants’ (which with a lot of changes became ‘Planet Of Giants’, the opener to season
two and is a bit of a one-off that doesn’t really sell the concept of the show
as well). There are problems though more are either unavoidable or only clear
in retrospect: Coburn’s decision to make Susan The Doctor’s grand-daughter
limits her character and alters what we see of his without really adding much
(being part of the same ‘tribe’ would make more sense in the context of this
story than being part of the same ‘family’), while having actors with fillings
and bad teeth and wearing fur bras seems ‘wrong’ (one extras walked off set
after refusing to take her false eyelashes off, on the grounds that some cavewomen
might have invented them!) The bones were supplied by an abattoir and stank
under the studio lights while the fur costumes gave everyone fleas, which might
explain why sometimes the performances aren’t, umm, always ‘up to scratch’. The
fight scene, recorded at Ealing on August 20th 1963 and thus the
first thing ever filmed for Who, is a little wonky too if better than some to come
through to the 1970s (and resulted in Who’s first behind the scenes blazing row
in the editing room, as the director wanted a sequence of a skull being knocked
in complete with sound effect and the producer said no way was that going out
on a Saturday teatime; in the end the action cuts away to Barbara and The
Doctor wincing, which in many ways is worse). There’s also Dr Who’s first
laughably low budget scene, when the money ran out for the ‘forest’ sequences
so stagehands simply hit the regulars with branches while they run on the spot
(and it looks exactly like it too!) Ian is either making a lot of money or for
some reason lost it given his 1949 Wolseley is not the sort of car you
associate with a teacher, yet might conceivably have been given to him when he
passed his test at seventeen if his family are rich. Coal Hill is unlike 99% of
1960s schools in that it doesn’t seem to have a school uniform (just as well or
Susan would be stuck in them the first few stories – perhaps she’s precocious
enough to be in a sixth form class despite being fifteen?) In an ironic twist
the cave backdrops aren’t as good as they might have been – because due to an
accident the first were thought to be fire-resistant and burned down, so what
we see is a last minute replacement! Perhaps the weirdest note of all in retrospect
is Susan’s claim that she came up with the acronym ‘Tardis’ which every
timelord we ever meet from now on will use (did Susan win a school competition
to name them?!) But then the people making this show weren’t thinking past the
end of 1963: it’s not their fault continuity has shifted since then.
Really, though, it’s the
regulars who shine and make this story work: Hartnell was hired to be the
crusty curmudgeon of the pilot episode so like his traditional grumpy
authoritarian film roles and yet he gets better and better as the years go by
and he gets to reveal a little more of the ‘Human’ side of this timelord a
‘bonus’ that nobody in 1963 considered when he was hired. William Russell is
brilliant as Ian, a man who goes from having never been flustered over anything
in his life to being totally out of his depth all the time, but still brave
enough to stand up to the Doctor and all passing aliens and cavemen. In some
ways this story is their tussle for power, the old man and the young man, just
like the cavemen. Jacqueline’ Hill’s Barbara is magnificent, inwardly panicked
but trying her best not to show it, as she becomes the quiet conscience of the
series already, making sure her friends do the right thing (although the story
only begins out of her desire to do the right thing by Susan; Ian gets roped in
because he’s curious too but it’s her idea to follow her pupil and find out
more about her; a lot of this series is about endless human curiosity. It seems
odd in retrospect that The Doctor is so angry at two people showing bravery and
curiosity, his two defining traits. Or maybe that’s why he’s so cross because
they’ve reminded him of who he really is?) This is Susan’s show though for now
and with an actual character to get her teeth into Carole Ann Ford is superb,
simultaneously a with-it hip girl of 1963 that everyone at home the same age
wanted to copy and all too believable as an other-wordly alien. Once they
remove her from 1963 the writers never quite know what to do with Susan and
turn her into a soppy child but here she’s a teenager, back when that word was
new, and there’s a difference: she stands up to her grandfather despite being
visibly scared of him. She is, for the teenagers and younger watching, ‘their
character, who only wanted to be understood and loved, while to the parents
watching she’s the youth of the day: full of weird ideas about peace, with a
fascination for pop music that sounds positively ‘stone age’ and a knowledge
about technology they don’t have. Susan is, here and sadly here only, the
perfect mixture of being wise before her years and impossibly young even for a
fifteen year old (later stories will hint that she’s really a hundred and
something).Most of all you really feel
her yearning to belong somewhere, if only for a little while, to find a ‘tribe’
of her own – that’s why she begged The Doctor to stay in Coal Hill to begin
with, but this isn’t really their home and they don’t really belong, any more
than Ian and Barbara do in the stone age.
After all, that’s what
this first story is really about – belonging, of finding the tribe of people we
want to bump around with for the rest of our lives whether we’re from 1963, the
far future or Palaeolithic times (the Doctor clearly misses his home too, not
that we know where it is yet) and how we relate to them be they friends,
family, schoolmates, work colleagues or aliens and in that this first adventure
is as timeless as any story made in a studio in 1963 can be. It’s a series for
everyone, where all are included whatever your species, gender or race (Stef
Coburn, who complained to the papers that his father would have been ‘horrified’
at the casting of a black Doctor and a Trans actress in 2024 perhaps didn’t
know his dad as well as fans do). Perhaps
the greatest most impressive thing about this story though is that a story
that’s set in the past and goes out of its way to tell us about things in the
then-present still feels so much like the future even today. No wonder
people were talking about Dr Who even before the Daleks came along (people forget
but average audience figures of six million for the repeat give or take – the
first screening got 4.6million but then most people were to shell-shocked by
Kennedy’s assassination to watch a new programme - and it had gone up to 6.9 by
episode four. Not bad for a show that was barely advertised and even then was
often erroneously billed as being ‘for children’ when it was made the adult
drama department, who’s biggest star’s heyday was twenty years earlier. The
Daleks and that first much talked-about cliffhanger will change the show’s
future forever but even after this first story Dr Who is defying odds, the
quirky show about outsiders that somehow had mass cross-appeal to a family
audience. It’s one of those ‘where were you when you first saw?…’ moments up there
with the moon landings, 9/11 and, yes, JFK’s assassination. Even if you’ve
never watched this show, even if you hate Dr Who (which, you know, seems
unlikely given that you’re reading this review but you never know – maybe you
stumbled across this site looking for a GP or something, in which case sorry,
have you tried directory enquiries?), if you’ve watched any British telly over
the past sixty years then you owe this story a lot because this story has all
sorts of firsts. And the best thing about it is ‘An Unearthly Child’ isn’t
hailed just because it was first but because it was also one of the best
stories in the series. It’s the perfect place to start, full of mystery and
intrigue and deeper themes as outside its time as can be so that it has just as
much power in 2023 as 1963 – and even though I sympathise with the Coburn family
only makes it more of a crying shame that the only people who get to see the
inspired hard work of Anthony and everyone else involved are now are the people
willing to pay over the odds for the DVD or VHS. It was, then
and now, one of the greatest most pioneering and downright weird things on
television, a series for children that broke so many rules it looked
unearthly.
NEGATIVES - I’m sorry,
but Susan has all the wonderful cooking hip and happening bands of 1963 to
enjoy (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Searchers and Gerry and The
Pacemakers to name but four; sadly it’s a fraction too early for a ‘The Who’
joke) and she chooses to fawn over...John Smith and the Common Men, a
cod-Shadows band, whose music would have seemed laughably passé to everyone
watching, given how quickly the charts changed back then, even if it’s very
1961 style is all too plausibly what the production team thought kids were
still listening to. If Susan likes this music so much why didn’t the Tardis nip
back in time a little bit earlier so she could hang around with Hank Marvin? In
reality, of course, its stock music (‘Three Guitars Mood 2’ by The Arthur
Nelson Group to be exact) so the BBC don’t have to pay copyright and as rock
and roll was still considered a ‘fad’ there probably wasn’t a lot of choice
around. Even so, its glaringly wrong nowadays and the one false part of this
story that leaps out at you: Susan ought to be rocking out to ‘She Loves You’,
that Autumn’s big hit (in a sign of just how much the youth were taking over
follow-up single ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ was released the day before episode
two of this story went out and was number one by episode three).Although maybe
that’s a bit obvious: Susan’s the kind of girl not to go with the mainstream
and would go with the cult band none of her friends are raving about but who
are still undeniably cool and who have the ability to update themselves for
every possible era across time and space. That settles it then: she’s a Hollies
fan.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: See
‘Remembrance Of The
Daleks’, a sort-of sequel that takes the 7th
Doctor (and Ace) back to Coal Hill School in 1963 and reveals what he was
really doing there (broadcast in Dr Who’s 25th anniversary year of
1988).
‘Dr Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks’
(1964), the very first Dr Who novel written by David Whittaker and in shops
whilst the end of the first season was still on the air, gives a very different
account for the Doctor and Susan’s meeting with Ian and Barbara. After all,
when Whittaker wrote the book there were no plans to novelise the entire range
the way Target did later: Who’s script editor felt he had to reintroduce the
characters in as little space as possible for an audience who might not have
seen the TV version and so cuts the entire ‘Coal Hill School’ part out and adds
a new introduction for how these four people know each other. Ian is a research
scientist driving down the road in Barnes Common (Putney way, ish, the closest
we’ve had to a clue about which end of London Coal Hill is in), minding his own
business driving home from an interview he thinks he’s failed, when he comes
across a car crash. Barbara, the driver of one vehicle, is dazed. The Doctor,
the sort-of driver of the other, is impossible, babbling about his ‘ship’ when
all Ian can see is a blue box. Barbara is the private tutor of ‘Susan English’
and has so many unanswered questions about her that she secretly followed her
home in the fog when the collision happens and collapses. Ian, who has never
met any of them before, goes to the police telephone box that’s miraculously
appeared to call for help – and gets the shock of his life. From thereafter the
book is mostly the same as the TV version of ‘The Daleks’,
although the Tardis has a lot more gadgets than you might have seen on TV (such
as an oil shower and a clothing repair machine!) and everything is told from
Ian’s point of view so is slightly biased against the other characters
(especially The Doctor, who if anything is even more cantankerous in the book
version!) Of course it’s all completely contradicted by Nigel Robinson's
novelisation of ‘An Unearthly Child’ published seventeen years later, which
just tells the story the way it happened on telly.
The ‘Short Trips’ range was so popular Big Finish
had a go at making their own audio series with the same name. Blimey The Doctor
had a busy day the day he met Ian and Barbara!
According to ‘Those Left Behind’ (2008), part of the anthology ‘How The Doctor Changed My Life’ by Violet Addison, he was also hanging round Coal Hill School looking for an alien insect known as a Hershax. His 4th self, with just K9 for company (in the gap between ‘Invasion Of Time’ and ‘The Ribos Operation’) finally remembers what he was doing that day when Ian and Barbara interrupted him nips back in time to track it down. While there he befriends Susan’s best pal Debbie. She’s celebrating her fifteenth birthday and wants to spend it with Susan but, of course, can’t find her anywhere. The 4th Doctor offers her closure, filling her in on what happened to her friend and the adventurous life she lived; quite why Debbie chooses to believe a stranger who’s clearly far too young physically to be Susan’s grandfather, is anyone’s guess. Still, considering that it’s written by a newbie writer who won a Big Finish competition, not bad at all: Violet gets the 4th Doctors flippant urgency bang on.
‘The Beginning’ (2013) is, as its title implies, a
rare story set at the very earliest days of Dr Who, finally telling the story every
fan wanted of how The Doctor and Susan came to steal a type 40 Tardis and leave
Gallifrey (though there’s no Clara there, as per ‘The Name Of The Doctor’,
which had been on TV a few months earlier!) Specially made by Big Finish for
the 50th anniversary, it’s Susan’s entry in the ‘Companion
Chronicle’ series and read by Carole Ann Ford herself for that special
authenticity, while Marc Platt, perhaps the most experienced writer working for
Big Finish, was a sensible choice to ask to write it. The result is clever but also
a bit weird and not what you might expect: The Doctor and Susan together aren’t
as interesting as The Doctor and Susan with Ian and Barbara, while it takes
maybe a few too many liberties with the lore: we’ve never heard before, for
instance, that a technician was actually inside working on the Tardis when it
was stolen! Quadrigger is a bit irritating actually: he doesn’t act like any
timelord we’ve ever seen before (even Strax was only putting on working class
airs as an effect) and is a bit of a thug who turns quite nasty, holding Susan
hostage at one point, while there’s still not much about what the pair were
fleeing and why. The story, too, quickly becomes just another primitive tale of
primitives on a hostile and alien world who used to have advanced technology
and forgot what it means (see ‘Full
Circle’ and ‘The
Face Of Evil’ amongst many, many others). Things look
up though when (spoilers) it turns out poor Susan’s been frozen in time and
deposited on the Earth’s moon though, where they’re recovered by some very
surprised Human archaeologists. Marc’s writing is as elegant as ever and this
is definitely one of the better ‘primitive world’ stories around, but it still feels
like a bit of a lost opportunity to do something a bit more special, an
anniversary story still so in awe of the original that it won’t properly go
near it.
‘Hunters Of the Burning Stone’ (2013) is Dr Who
Magazine’s 50th birthday pressie, a comic strip that says what
happened next to the Tribe of Gum after the end of the original story. It
starts with the 11th Doctor on board an Earth spaceship after a
battle with some Sontarons where the alien technology is used on him and
transports him across time to Coal Hill School, where Ian and Barbara don’t
recognise him and assume given how young he looks that he’s a pupil! Much fun
is had with their misunderstandings as The Doctor slowly realises that they’re
all inside a psychic prison made using (what else?) ‘psychic metal’ that’s
wiped their memories – they eventually get them back when The Doctor mentions
Susan. However they’re clueless about regeneration and assume this newcomer is
an interloper who’s stolen their Doctors Tardis (you’d think he’d have
mentioned it to them!) – especially when
Eleven appears to know how to work it, which their Doctor never did! The Doctor
tracks down the jailors, The Prometheans to a planet named Cornucopia where
they talk about their ‘children’ the ‘Hunters’ who turn out to be Za, Hur and
Hog from the Tribe of Gum that have since developed the power of speech. How
can this be? Well, the Prometheans have been going to primitive worlds and
kidnapping people, testing the point at which they turned into civilised people
and by chance chose people who’d met time travellers, which intrigued them so
much that they laid a trap. Ian and Barbara were easy to track down, The Doctor
less so (goodness only knows why they couldn’t find Susan on Earth from before
she was taken). The aggressive Hunters are told stories of what the trio got up
to next and the importance of peace (the opposite of the ‘war’ speech in ‘The Daleks’)
causing them to have a change of heart and turn on the Prometheans, while the
story ends in the perfect way with The Doctor attending Ian and Barbara’s
wedding. There are some lovely moments here (such as Ian comforting an 11th
Doctor haunted by losing so many good friends in battle, telling him what a
good man he was and The Doctor commenting on how much being with Ian and Barbara
shaped him for the better) while it’s rare indeed to see Ian and Barbara in
comic form (as the original 1st Doctor strips couldn’t afford to pay
for their likenesses) – they’re pretty good too, especially Ian’s look of
befuddlement! All in all one of the best DWM strips going and one well worth
tracking down.
Also 6th Doctor story ‘Attack Of The Cyberman’
(1984) has the Doctor arriving back in Totter’s Lane in an attempt to fix the
Tardis chameleon circuit and turning it into a pipe organ (!) before realising
he kind of likes it as a police telephone call box anyway!
Next ‘The Daleks’
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