An Unearthly Child: Ranking - 22

 

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?...' 

 

We made it!!! Anniversary month is here at last and with it come the final crop of 22 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 all practically all roads: typically the one surviving story that isn’t there is ‘An Unearthly Child’, the story that kick-starts this month’s reviews and indeed the entire series, which seemed an obvious place to start when I was working this ordering out and tweaking it slightly. 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 glues to the DVD player rather than the i-player this morning. How did it end up being that way? Well its all a case of our hero going back in time and asking ‘do I have the rights?’ as he completes his mission for the timelord. And the first story writer Anthony Cobun’s son said no. From his point of view the BBC always undervalued his dad’s contribution to DW history (this is the only story he ever wrote but he had another story finished that never got made), got a paltry fee for it and blames the negotiations over royalties in the TV repeat/home video age as what killed him, so he has a right to feel aggrieved. From their side its always been felt that the first episode of this four parter had little to do nothing to do with Coburn anyway (its generally accepted that it was by first script editor David Whittaker based on notes from his predecessor CE Webber but rules inside the BBC meant only one writer ever got credited on a story at a time) and it was all a long time ago – its 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 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 this story feels as if it knows exactly what its doing (a bonus, perhaps, of the first episode having been shot twice, the original version left I the vaults and unscreened for more than a quarter century). 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 in one go 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), 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 DW 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 DW has to re-sell its main points to a new audience, especially when a new companion, Doctor or 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 what it took us eighteen years to understand). This time though is the first time we get to do a lot of the things we’ll do later and so this story has to sell the concept to us at speed and so 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 Dr’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 DW 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 DW biographers, but to the people working on them at the time the first three years of DW are really just referred to by their production codes behind the scenes or ‘the one about the…’ in the school playgrounds). She’s 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 whose 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 whose 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 DW 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 DW’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 Dr’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) DW is still recognisably about looking at the Earth from an outsider’s 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, 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 Vidal Sassoon hairdo). 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 cont it as a ‘proper’ story would very much be in my top 50, probably around this number, it’s such a sweet loveletter 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 1^st Dr is sold to us back in 1963 though. For a start he’s not the 1^st 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 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 Dr is shifty, angry, defensive, untrusting, devious and sneaky – the sort of things the Dr 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 Dr grows to match them. This is a series about learning in so many ways, DW 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. There are several great moments in the opening episode to keep you hooked whatever demographic you’re from: 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 they were 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 Dr is complaining of a faulty chameleon circuit that gets stuck and which he’ll only repair, briefly, in 1986, 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 walk 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, its 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 its being beamed in from the future (even now its 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). 

The Tardis is a brilliant conception, inside and out, conjured up by designer Ray Cusick on a napkin in his lunch break so the story goes, 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. 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 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 DW writers Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner amongst others, also set in a junkyard) 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 DWs 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. The view from most reviewers, even before the Coburn debacle, 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. After all, there was a critical backlash against DW in the papers from as early as the second episode when The Guardian said it had ‘fallen off badly’ since the first week! But I love these three episodes too, in a different 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? (And on an unspecified planet: we never do find out if this is Earth or not; for all we know every civilisation starts the same and its not as if there’s any lack of humanoid aliens who look like us across the future of this series). If they can do that then what can they possibly do next week? DW is still trading off that excitement that keeps you watching to one extent or another – even now, 312 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 Dr. Well, now even the brightest and bravest cavemen seem primitive to Ian and Barbara, who suddenly understand 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. Now, after 25 minutes of the impossibly new in the future, we get to see where things started, with the 1960s merely one dot on the line between the two (after all, back then the Dr was ambiguous enough to be a human from the far future – nobody could decide if he was an alien or not until the end of the decade). It’s also a clever means of showing how close the past is to us in the present, broadcast in the 1960s when countries were 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 (it’s worth remembering that the Cuban Missile Crisis was almost precisely a year old when the first episode of this story went out, while rocketships powered by a sort-of fire shooting out the back were everywhere in the news back then, the pinnacle of human invention that couldn’t have taken place without this first step). 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 and 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). 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 but for me 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, it’s hard to become as involved in the cavemen’s situation as it is other people we meet across the course of the series and the last three episodes certainly aren’t as good as the first, becoming the first of many a DW 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. I do think that fans underestimate episodes 2-4 though: eve without that first episode this would be in my top 100 easily. it looks highly impressive considering its being shot in a tiny TV studio, 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 52 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). Really, though, its the regulars who shine: Hartnell was hired to be the crusty curmudgeon of the pilot episode (re-shot from scratch at some expense to become episode one after Sydney Newman objected to various technical failures and made a few other suggestions: Susan drawing ink-blots rather than getting in a tizzy about mistakes in a book of The French Revolution and more specific lines about the Dr and Susan’s origins that were removed to keep the mystery; they were from the 42^nd century, which might be why fan and future writer Douglas Adams chose that as his ‘magic number’ in Hitch-Hiker’s later) 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 193 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 Dr and all passing aliens and 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 its her idea to follow her pupil and find out more about her; a lot of this series is about endless human curiosity). 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 and you really feel her yearning to belong somewhere, if only for a little while, to find a ‘tribe’ of her own. After all, that’s what this first story is 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 paleolithic times (the Dr 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. 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. 

This show really is timeless, which is why its still running now, but never more than its opening instalment. As much as the actors and writers and even its creator Sydney Newman have got credit for the birth of this show over the years all the applause in the world should go to its two chief midwives who helped get this thing on the telly at all: Verity Lambert, British TV’s first female producer and Warris Hussain, British TV’s first Indian director, who 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. No wonder people were talking about Dr Who even before the Daleks came along (people forget but average audience figures of six million give or take was highly respectable for a show billed as being ‘for children’, whose biggest star’s heyday was twenty years earlier and whose publicity amounted to half a page in the Radio Times and a couple of newspaper articles). It’s one of those ‘where were you when you first saw?…’ moments up there with the moon landings, 9/11 and JFK’s assassination (which took place the very night before episode one went out – understandably not many people watched that night so the BBC sneaked a repeat on directly before episode two). Even if you’ve never watched this show, even if you hate DW (which, you know, seems unlikely given that you’re reading this 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 60 years then you owe this story a lot. 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. It’s the perfect place to start – which 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.

+One of the things this series got right from the get go was the opening credits and theme tune which, while they’ve been tweaked and coloured and re-made over the years, are still both recognisably the same today. This original opening sequence was created by howlaround’, an accidental discovery of technician Bernard Lodge, who found that if he pointed a TV camera at its own monitor (used for cameramen to keep an eye on how the action would look on screen while it was being shot) it would create lots of interesting looking pulsating shapes. Further experiments found that you could add words into the effects – and later faces and colour, though not yet. BBC composer Ron Grainer(whose best known theme tune before this was for ‘Steptoe and Son’) wrote a tune to fit the pulsing words and composer Delia Derbyshire (the first female music writer at the BBC) and assistant Dick Mills then played it through all the gadgets at their disposal at the Radiophonic Workshop, getting the utterly inadequate credit ‘arrangement by’ for all future stories. For the melody wasn’t adapted, it was alienised, painstakingly made to sound as weird and other-worldly as possible, with the rhythm put together individually through trial and error, through a combination of plucked piano strings, white noise and something called an ‘oscillator’,a sort of early synthesiser (but analogue) that altered the pitch of the notes and played them back at random, giving a wowy and suitably spacey effect, with a keyboard ‘filling’ in the non-musical sounds and more white noise was plastered over the top. One of those would be wild enough, but both together – there was nothing like it. Even in its opening seconds this series was groundbreaking and dared you to look away. A quick word too for what surely must be the best sound effect in scifi: figuring the Tardis must move by tearing a tiny hole in the fabric of time and space, the Radiophonic Workshop came up with the perfect sound effect: a key being rubbed against piano strings, slowed down, then treated with echo and more effects. They still use it now more or less unaltered because its just so good.

- 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 its a fraction too early 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 passée to everyone watching, given how quickly the charts changed back then, even if its 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? In reality, of course, its stock music 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.