Doctor Who: An Unearthly Child

TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE- A COMPARISON

IF YOU SEARCH LONG ENOUGH YOU’LL FIND THE POT OF GOLD. FOR ME, IT’S THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE. IN THE 1960S THERE WEREN’T MANY SERIOUS ARTICLES ON DOCTOR WHO. EVERYONE JUST TALKED ABOUT THE DALEKS AND THE TOYS, OR DOES IT JUST SEEM THAT WAY? WHILE DOING RESEARCH CONCERNING THE CONTROVERSIAL NON-BROADCASTED ABC COMEDY SERIES PACKAGED RHINOCEROS FOR RENT, I CAME ACROSS FOUR ISSUES OF A TELEVISION MAGAZINE FROM THE MID 1960S. IT WAS CALLED TV NOW AND IT TRIED TO SERIOUSLY DEAL WITH THE POPULAR CULTURE PHENOMENON THAT WAS TELEVISION. THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE, BY ALETHEA BERTORELLI, WAS PUBLISHED IN NOVEMBER 1965 IN THE THIRD EDITION OF TV NOW.
IT DEALT WITH THE PILOT EPISODE AND THE EPISODE THAT AIRED. ADDED TO THAT, ALETHEA TRIED TO PIECE TOGETHER A PRODUCTION HISTORY FOR AN UNEARTHLY CHILD. IT MAKES FOR FASCINATING READING. AS A FINAL NOTE, TV NOW, AS FAR AS I CAN TELL, ONLY LASTED FOUR ISSUES. IT’S A PITY IT WASN’T MORE SUCCESSFUL, BUT THAT’S THE SIXTIES FOR YOU.

Well, what a summer we've had. Dalekmania was everywhere. Besides the widely successful feature film, there was the merchandise, and especially the toys. This month heralds a Dalek adventure that will last till the end of January. The Daleks are everywhere and I’m sick of them. It wouldn’t surprise me if people have forgotten that the Daleks have come from a splendid programme called Doctor Who. Ah, now you remember. Guess what? Doctor Who is two years old this month. The Dalek media frenzy is overbearing but at the centre lies a soul that is Doctor Who, the television programme produced by the BBC. Another surprising point is that Doctor Who existed before the Daleks. Oh yes. Recently, I got my hands on the original episode, An Unearthly Child. Thanks to the BBC who allowed me a private viewing. While talking to the good people there, I was surprised to discover that An Unearthly Child has a younger twin, a pilot. This made my mind race- how does something like Doctor Who ever get conceived by a large corporation like Auntie.

From the beginning, with the repetitive, rhythmic theme music composed by the talented Ron Grainer, juxtaposed with the feedback howl-around visuals, you know this programme is going to be different. We’re then transported to a foggy night and a police man on his rounds around the front of a scrap yard. As he leaves, after he makes sure the yard’s gates are secure, they swing open to reveal a very strange thing- a police box standing in the middle of the yard. To enhance the mystery, the police box is humming, as if it’s a living machine. This is a great way to hook the audience in. So many questions arise in the first scene that you’re compelled to watch on. Anthony Coburn’s writing and Warris Hussein’s taut direction are addictive.

The next major scene takes place in a school science laboratory. Two teachers Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton are discussing a very strange student of theirs- Susan Foreman, the unearthly child of the title. From her surname, she is immediately connected to the police box scrap yard. According to the teachers, she’s a genius in science and history. The connection to the scrap yard is finally cemented when Barbara tells Ian that’s where Susan says she lives- in an old junk yard. As Ian replies “That’s a bit of a mystery.”

Then we get to see Susan. She’s listening to a band on a transistor radio. However, she’s performing a strange hand dance. She’s startled by the arrival of the two teachers, but she doesn’t seem too strange. She comes across as nervous and shy with a very apologetic manner. A straightforward teenager you might say. Well, she hits that presumption for six when she refuses a ride home- “I like walking through the dark. It’s mysterious.” When the teachers leave, Susan flips through a book on the French Revolution that Barbara has lent her. She’s a strange creature because she dismisses something in the book as an error, as if she had first hand knowledge.

The next nine scenes, mostly in flashback, deal with Susan's strangeness. We actually see some of Susan’s knowledge contradictions where she’s brilliant at some subjects and ignorant of other simple things. “Too many questions and not enough answers.”

Finally, Susan arrives and the teachers follow her in. This is where we find out the truth. Then again... Susan disappears and the teachers are dumbstruck by the police box that’s vibrating as if it’s alive. 11 and a half minutes, the mysterious Doctor makes his first appearance in his own show. He seems likeable underneath his lying, confident, denying exterior as he tries to convince the teachers that Susan is not around. Susan messes the Doctor’s subterfuge as she opens the machine’s doors. The teachers burst to discover the... TARDIS.

The internal TARDIS scene gives us more questions than answers. A futuristic space ship, with a hexagonal control console and a circular roundels theme design on the walls, inside an ordinary blue police box? Why ever not. Ian can’t believe it’s a ship. But the Doctor wittily puts him in his place - “Yes, yes, ship. This doesn’t roll along on wheels, you know.” We discover that the Doctor and Susan are from another time, another world. Exiles from their own world:

Have you ever thought what it is like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension, have you? To be exiles... Susan and I are cut off from our own planet, without friends or protection. But one day... we shall return... we shall get back. Yes, one day...one day.

The duo are aliens, but Susan still wants to stay in 1960s London. But the Doctor gives her an ultimatum: if he releases the teachers, they have to leave this time zone. But this backfires on the Doctor when Susan insists that she wants to stay in this time and she’d rather leave her grandfather. The Doctor, his back to the wall, does the only thing he can do to keep Susan with him- he operates the TARDIS and they leave, along with Ian and Barbara, 1960s Earth and finally land after a minute of dimension travelling on a desolate landscape a long time into the past.

And so ends the first episode of one of the most intriguing and original programmes ever to come out of the BBC. Questions were answered but those answers created more questions. It’s an exceptional episode that has set up the rest of the series very nicely. A remarkable beginning that has since been sidetracked by the advent of the Dalek media circus. But how was such a splendid concept ever thought up by the agreeable souls at the Beeb? I’m glad you asked. Our story begins over a year and a half before Doctor Who ever reached our screen.

Donald Baverstock, the BBC Controller of Programmes, knew something was needed to fill the gap in the Saturday schedule between Grandstand, the popular sports programme, and Juke Box Jury, the pop music show. A half hour show was needed and science fiction seemed a good genre to explore. Donald Wilson the then Head of the Script Department, had supervised a survey on science fiction literature and it did the rounds at the BBC between April and July 1962. One of the ideas was time travel. By December 1962, Canadian Sydney Newman, the Head of Drama at ITV franchise ABC arrived at Auntie and the idea really progressed with him as the Head of Drama.

In March 1963, Newman and Baverstock discussed the requirement for a new programme to bridge the Saturday schedules. Newman outlined a general science fiction idea involving time travel.

So we required a new programme that would bridge the state of mind of sports fans and the teenage pop music audience while also attracting and holding the children’s audience accustomed to their Saturday afternoon serial. So that’s the ‘why’ of Doctor Who.
Sydney Newman

This idea was then handed to Wilson who nurtured the idea and developed the format. He recruited C.E. Webber, a staff writer to develop the characters. By April Newman approved of the ideas of a time travel show but insisted on two extra characters- a teenager and a grumpy old man to be called the Doctor “who has stolen the time machine from his own people, an advanced civilisation on a far distant planet.”

The concept developed further when staff producer/director Rex Tucker was appointed temporary producer in May until Newman’s favoured choice was able to take up the position. Meanwhile, Tucker had asked Tristram Cary to compose the theme and incidental music for the first episodes. He also asked Hugh David to play the Doctor, but David declined. He also had casting ideas about the other main characters. By the end of May Mervyn Pinfield joined the production as associate producer. A very experienced television man, he was recruited because of the inexperience of the young incoming new producer, Verity Lambert.

By June, C.E. Webber had finished the scripts. Called The Giants, they concerned the time travellers accidentally shrinking to a minute size and having to run the gamut of a school science laboratory. Tucker and Wilson rejected the scripts and Wilson contacted another staff writer, Australian Anthony Coburn, to write the first story. Coburn’s’ “introductory” episode An Unearthly Child was similar in spirit to Webber’s but his other episodes concerned the main characters travelling to the Stone Age.

Verity Lambert, Newman’s choice as producer for this complex show, arrived in the next month to produce her first ever show. At ABC, she was a production assistant on Armchair Theatre. David Whitaker, the last piece of the production crew jigsaw joined Doctor Who ten days after Lambert. Now things begin to change at a pace. Lambert rejected all of Tucker’s casting choices and began, to make her own. Added to that, Ron Grainer was hired to write the theme tune. Lambert was faced with another problem. She and Whitaker were very unhappy with Coburn’s scripts but they had to deal with Coburn’s scripts as best they could. Around this time young director Waris Hussein was appointed to the programme. As he remembered:

I was brought in at the time when Anthony Coburn’s scripts for the first story were still being questioned and Verity was trying to find an alternative writer. We just sat there, looking at each other, saying “What do we do with these scripts?” Then we had to start seriously getting underway with it, and of course there was a lot of confusion. In the end we just had to go with the scripts we’d got, as there was a deadline to meet.

Experienced character actor William Hartnell was chosen to play the Doctor. He was reluctant at first, but it was a different role than he usually played, so he finally agreed. William Russell (Ian), Jacqueline Hill (Barbara) and Carole Ann Ford (Susan) are the other cast members.

The thing that has most surprised me was that the production crew actually filmed a pilot. It was recorded on September 27. But there were problems. Newman watched it and wasn’t happy at all about it. He requested a remount as Hussein explained:

In fact, the first version was never meant to be a pilot, it was meant to be the transmitted episode. However, we were floundering and the result was, to my memory, extremely slow and turgid. The scene where the characters enter the ship was originally a disaster. Also, Jacqueline Hill’s heel got caught somewhere, when she was trying to enter one of the classrooms, and I remember shouting from the control room and nothing happening! Anyway, Sydney took Verity and me out to dinner one night and told us “I cannot allow this thing to go out, I’ve got too much on the line.”

More on the pilot later on. The remount was successfully recorded on October 18. Around that time Baverstock granted Doctor Who 13 slots in the Saturday schedule. This seemed a small amount of episodes so the production crew had to insert a 2 part episode to round the episodes to 13. The rest of the commissioned scripts would’ve probably then been scraped. However, on November 22 Baverstock accepted Wilson’s recommendation for further slots so another 13 episodes were granted for the schedule with perhaps a strong possibility of another 13 extra to be decided on early in the new year. A day later, Saturday, November 23, the first Doctor Who episode was transmitted.

As described above, in a very limited and general way, Doctor Who was an enormous burden and effort on many people within the BBC to carry out. There were problems and drawbacks even from the beginning but fortunately for the good Doctor he had very powerful friends in high places. Their faith and belief in the programme has paid off and now the programme has been a great success.

So what of this mysterious pilot? Obviously, it will never see the light of day. There’s plenty of reasons why it won’t. There are a lot technical and narrative problems with it. From what I can ascertain, Hussein used only a two camera set up for the pilot and this caused a lot of visual anomalies. For instance, we follow the policeman as he moves to the junkyard’s gates. The camera then pans down and shows us the footpath. Interestingly, the TARDIS emits an eerie flashing glow along with the usual humming.

Once again, in the schoool scene where Barbara and Ian discuss Susan, the camera follows Ian and Barbara around the room in a very jerky fashion that removes the emphasis away from the dialogue concerning Susan’s strangeness and unique abilities. An interesting observation is how different Susan’s characterisation is. In the pilot she comes across as very powerful and superior, almost condescending to the teachers. Add coldness and a patronising attitude and you have yourself a true alien. Here she is indeed an unearthly child. In the remounted episode her character is softened. This is an improvement. In the remount, her strangeness is displayed by her dismissing information in a text book about the French Revolution as being inaccurate. In the pilot, she produces an abstract inkblot/sketch which is too enigmatic.

In the junkyard there are too many mistakes. The crudity comes across too obviously. The camera crashes loudly into the set and the composition is flawed with heads missing and the action not happening in the centre of the shot. It seems the director needed more time with his cameramen to get the shots right. A total improvement in the remount is the softening of the Doctor’s character. In the pilot he is too much of an anti-hero. He is very aggressive and nasty, treating the teachers as contemptible fools. Inside the TARDIS he calls Susan a “stupid child”. The Doctor is an unpleasant selfish old man. Meanwhile, the doors won’t shut and you can hear the scene hands noisily trying to close the doors correctly.

There were improvements in the script as well. In the pilot, Susan claims she’s from the 49th century, too specific a time frame. The Doctor also assumes that if he let’s them go then with the knowledge of something like the TARDIS existing, it will be like the Roman’s inventing gunpowder. The remount script flowed much better and the plot points were more logical and “real”. For instance, in the remount the Doctor gives Susan an ultimatum- if he let’s the teachers go, then they must leave Earth.

Overall, the remount was a better constructed episode, both script wise and technically, with Hussein returning to the more practice multi-camera system. The pilot gives an insight of what might have been, but I think Doctor Who wouldn’t have lasted two years if the original was transmitted. No one would have liked the Doctor very much, and it’s his programme. It’s a fascinating programme and its history has been as tumultuous as what we’ve seen on screen. Let’s hope it continues for another two years.

RECENTLY, IT HAS BEEN THE FANS THEMSELVES WHO HAVE DELVED DEEPLY INTO THE HISTORY OF THE MAKING OF DOCTOR WHO. THE FOLLOWING ARE GOOD EXAMPLES OF THIS PAINSTAKING YET EXTREMELY VALUABLE RESEARCH.

THE FRAME #8, #16.
THE FIRST DOCTOR HANDBOOK.
THE DOCTORS: 30 YEARS OF TIME TRAVEL.

All quotes are from the above publications