Although the show was off to a shaky start within the BBC, those involved in making it felt they were producing something unusual that would at least be interesting to a wide range of viewers. It was certainly unlike anything the TV audience had seen before. From the unusual, swirling title sequence and unearthly, ‘whooshing’ theme tune, Doctor Who was laying claim to territory the BBC had not previously explored. The show was verging on the avant-garde in its unique visual and aural effects, and must have been something of a shock to a 1963 TV audience unused to such weird images and sounds on regular television.
The innovative design of the Doctor Who titles, music, TARDIS exterior and interior and the Daleks played a huge part in the impact of the new science-fantasy show. The opening titles were devised by Lambert and associate producer Mervyn Pinfield, who was continuing to supervise the show’s technical requirements. Drawing on the work of an experimental technical group within the BBC, led by Bernard Lodge, the Doctor Who team used electronic visual feedback to create the otherworldly, swirling clouds out of which came the words ‘Doctor Who’ and (later) the Doctor’s face. ‘I think it just looked so very strange and different from anything else,’ Lambert said of the show’s opening visuals. ‘I just didn’t want it to look like “time” – I wanted it to look familiar but odd, which is what the Doctor Who theme [tune] was.’
The series’ theme tune had been developed by Delia Derbyshire from the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, working from a composition by prolific TV-theme composer Ron Grainer. The rhythmic, pulsing theme seemed to match the abstract titles, while the weird bubbling and whooshing sounds set up the viewer to anticipate something unusual. Lambert and Derbyshire’s inspiration was the French abstract musique concrete movement, which also influenced the selection of the series’ early stock incidental episodic music. The scene-setting of the titles and music were just the curtain raiser to the drama about to unfold in front of an unsuspecting Saturday-teatime TV audience.
BBC staff designer Peter Brachacki designed the TARDIS interior (revised by Barry Newberry when the pilot episode was remounted), while Ray Cusick interpreted Terry Nation’s description of the Daleks for the second story. Taking up half the floor space within the studio, the interior of the TARDIS was in dramatic contrast with the limited police-box exterior. The large recessed circles on the interior walls contrasted with the hard, straight lines of the police-box shape. In the middle of the all-white room was the ship’s control console, a six-sided unit built around the (later-named) ‘time rotor’ central column, which would rise and fall to indicate the ship was in flight (combined with effective sounds). The hexagonal console reflected the staggered, almost hexagonal patterns made by the (fan-named) ‘roundels’ on the walls. At the end of the 2008 series, in the episode Journey’s End, it is revealed that this six-sided console had been designed to accommodate the six pilots required to fly the TARDIS properly (a fan theory incorporated into the ongoing epic televisual narrative). Softening the alien effect of the ship’s interior were the furniture and artefacts from various times that Brachacki chose to dress the set. This reinforced the Doctor’s quasi-Victorian demeanour and suggested that the ship’s original occupants had already travelled widely in history. All these design elements, absorbed by viewers in a near unconscious manner, went a long way to creating the initial impact of Doctor Who. The opening episode effectively bridged the narrative gap from the ordinary and everyday lives of a pair of London schoolteachers to the adventures in time and space that the series would pursue for the next 45 years and beyond.
According to BBC records, an audience of 4.4 million viewers were watching at 5.15pm on 23 November (the day following the assassination of President Kennedy) as the first episode of Doctor Who, entitled An Unearthly Child, was broadcast. The episode introduced the title character and his granddaughter Susan Foreman, a pupil at Coal Hill School who intrigues her science and history teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. As the teachers compare notes on their pupil, who is brilliant at some things and curiously ignorant of others, they follow her home to a junkyard in Totter’s Lane. When the teachers enter the yard, Susan appears to have vanished, but there is a curious sight: a police box. Usually found on street corners, this police box is rather unusual: ‘It’s alive,’ exclaims Ian as he discovers an electronic hum emanating from the strange blue box. The teachers hide as an older man, apparently Susan’s grandfather, enters the yard and prepares to enter the mysterious box. Hearing Susan’s voice coming from inside, the teachers engage the old man in debate and then force their way through the doors.
So far, so familiar, may have been most TV viewers’ reaction to this pseudo-domestic drama that wasn’t too different in style from a contemporary 1960s TV drama like Z-Cars. Apart from the strange music and swirling patterns in the title sequence, the first half of Doctor Who’s debut episode actually plays like a social-realist tale about a pupil and her concerned teachers. It’s only when the action cuts, at the halfway mark, to inside the mysterious police box that Doctor Who really demonstrates its dramatic difference from anything else airing on British television in 1963.
The teachers spill into a vast white space, much bigger than the police box that seems to contain it. As they express astonishment at their new environment, the camera takes in the six-sided central control console, the circular indents on the walls and the computer banks and TV screen. As the Doctor taunts the confused and concerned teachers about their failure to understand what they see, and Susan pleads for her grandfather to free them, he sets the TARDIS in motion. As the ship rocks violently, knocking all the occupants unconscious, the series leads into its first ever cliff-hanger. Disappearing from contemporary London, the police box reappears in a desolate, primitive landscape, only for the shadow of a humanoid creature to fall across it. As the unfamiliar, eerie theme music returned, those initial 4.4 million viewers could have been left in no doubt that they were no longer watching a social-realist drama in the style of Z-Cars. There was nothing else on television the audience could compare Doctor Who to. All they could do was tune in again at the same time the following week to find out what would happen next.
Tune in they did, with viewing figures increasing by almost two million between the first two episodes. Concerned that the news of the assassination of John F Kennedy might have overshadowed the launch of the new series, the BBC repeated An Unearthly Child on Saturday 30 November, following it immediately with the serial’s second episode, The Cave of Skulls. Around 6.4 million viewers were watching that night. The remaining three episodes of the first serial (collectively, the first four episodes are now widely known as An Unearthly Child) saw the time travellers getting to know each other as they fought to survive the conflict between the two would-be leaders of a primitive tribe of humans. Ian and Barbara are reluctant travellers, catapulted into a nightmare against their wills. For his part, the Doctor didn’t invite them to enter his ship, so feels little responsibility for their subsequent troubles, even though only he and the TARDIS can get them back to 1963. Hartnell’s Doctor, although softened through Sydney Newman’s intervention, is still a selfish and potentially violent character. In the serial’s third episode, The Forest of Fear, he is seen preparing to use a heavy stone to attack a wounded caveman in order that the group might escape. The story sees the travellers introduce fire to the caveman culture in the last episode, The Firemaker, and they escape to the TARDIS, pursued by the cavemen. As the ship dematerialises once more, any thoughts of safety are lost as they arrive at a new, even more alien destination and a radiation meter (unseen by the characters, but visible to the audience) lurches into the danger zone. This element, where one complete adventure would end with a cliff-hanger leading into the next, would soon be abandoned, but it served in the early months to blur the separation between one adventure and the next in the minds of the audience and would keep them viewing, one week to the next, one story to the next.
Amid the strangeness of the design, the incongruity o
f the police box and the oddness of the Doctor, there was arguably one thing that ensured the success of Doctor Who during those first few weeks on air: the arrival of the Daleks.
There is a certain irony to the fact that the very element which ensured the new show’s future were the ‘bug-eyed monsters’ Sydney Newman and the committee that developed the show had hoped to avoid in their pursuit of literary science fiction for the screen. From the second serial’s first-episode audience of 6.9 million (on a par with the preceding episodes), the audience would grow to in excess of 10 million by the end of the seven-part story entitled The Daleks. As 1963 ended, a delighted Donald Baverstock officially renewed the series, extending the run from the initial 13 episodes to 36 weeks. Thanks to the Daleks, who’d go on to become his perpetual, recurring enemy, Doctor Who was here to stay.
Scripted by Terry Nation, the Dalek serial featured situations and images that would have resonated greatly with an audience that had lived through the Second World War only 20 years before. In Nation’s simplistic storyline, the hideously mutated Daleks are the fascist forces, while the pacifist, humanist Thals (in a neat inversion, they are blonde haired and seemingly blue-eyed – traditional Aryan traits) represented the various nations of the world forced to fight for their own survival.
Nation’s script described the Daleks thus: ‘Hideous, machine-like creatures [with] no human features. A lens of a flexible shaft that acts as an eye. Arms with mechanical grips for hands.’ It’s unclear exactly how Nation envisaged the Daleks should look: that was a detail he was willing to leave to the BBC designers, even though – as it turned out – he was to profit greatly from their iconic design. The main creative force behind the visual impact of the Dalek machine was BBC staff designer Raymond Cusick. It was Cusick, following Nation’s blueprint, who tried to make the creatures as inhuman looking as possible, eliminating the human outline by removing arms, legs and any recognisable face. That the design was fundamentally unaltered when Doctor Who returned to television, over 40 years and several production teams later, is a testament to the vision of Nation and, particularly, Cusick.
Why did the Daleks capture the imagination of the UK’s children, in particular? Their distinctive movements and grating, halting vocals were easy to imitate, a practice which quickly erupted in playgrounds up and down the land following Christmas 1963. They were easy for children to draw, with an instantly recognisable silhouette and simple shapes. More interestingly, within the serial itself, the Daleks had been mocked by the show’s heroes: Ian showed children how to ‘play’ at being Daleks when he climbed into one of the casings and had fun altering his voice to be Dalek-like. The show itself undermined the implied horror of the creatures, allowing the children in the audience a way to accept the Daleks as monsters it was fun to be scared of.
The original impact of the Daleks is easy to underestimate, looking back now from the perspective of the twenty-first century, when they are so familiar to us. According to BBC information used to sell Doctor Who abroad in the mid-1960s, ‘Eighty-five per cent of letters to the BBC’s popular Points of View [a TV feedback programme] concerned the Daleks.’ The document went on to itemise examples of viewers’ Dalek-related activity, including one Birmingham girl who’d constructed a model Dalek from egg boxes and silver paper and a Scottish viewer who wanted to form a ‘Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Daleks’. There were many requests to purchase Daleks, either full-size props or toy models.
The back-story of a nuclear war between the Thals and the Dals (later Kaleds in the later revisionist history of Genesis of the Daleks) on the planet Skaro played right into 1960s Cold-War concerns, an issue that would have resonated with just about every one of the 10 million viewers of the serial (the Cuban missile crisis – during which Russia had deployed nuclear warheads to Cuba, just off the American coast, provoking an extreme political-military crisis – had taken place a mere 12 months earlier). The technology of body replacement (explored more chillingly later with the Cybermen) that had turned the Dals into the Daleks was also understandable to an audience familiar with the concepts of replacement limbs and then-theoretical heart transplants. Viewers could even have regarded the Daleks’ tank-like, life-support ‘travel machines’ as giant iron lungs.
To make the first 13 episodes of the show self-contained (in case the series ended there, as was possible before the success of the Daleks ensured its continuation), Verity Lambert had commissioned a standalone two-part story to follow the Dalek adventure, utilising only the standing sets of the TARDIS and the regular cast.
The psychological drama that ensues when the TARDIS malfunctions in The Edge of Destruction allowed the characters to express and expunge their distrust of each other, clearing the air for them to return for future adventures as a more coherent team. It also allowed for the final clarification of the nature of the Doctor’s character, which had evolved through the first 13 episodes from that of a self-interested but curious and reluctant traveller to an adventurer, willing to investigate situations and make moral judgements, taking sides in conflicts and energising the oppressed. This would be a format that would serve the series well for many years to come: the Doctor had become a crusader for freedom in all its forms.
Those first 13 weeks that Doctor Who was on air, and the many months of preparation that had preceded them, laid the foundations for an epic televisual myth which would grow and prosper over most of the next 26 years before being triumphantly reborn in the twentyfirst century, where it once again captured the imagination and affection of the entire nation.
2. BLACK & WHITE HEAT
It is arguable that what are now popularly perceived as ‘the 1960s’ didn’t really begin in the UK until 1964, the year of the Labour victory in the General Election following 13 years of continuous Conservative rule. Change was in the air in the run up to the October poll, and although the Labour victory was narrow (five seats), it reflected the huge political and social changes taking place in the whole country.
With the conclusion of the two-part, self-contained psychological thriller The Edge of Destruction, Doctor Who had successfully survived into 1964, despite the doubts of many within the BBC about the series’ ongoing viability: the show now had a commitment that would see it last at least until the end of its second year. The challenge faced by producer Verity Lambert was how to broaden and deepen the adventures of the Doctor and his companions. Her solution was to split the Doctor’s journeys into two broad categories: historical tales and science-fiction adventures, with the originally proposed ‘sideways’ adventures largely unexplored.
The earliest development work on Doctor Who had focused on ways of bringing literary science fiction to the small screen, but it was the barely developed educational remit that would drive the stories set in different periods of Earth’s history. The mid-May 1963 format document, written by CE Webber and annotated by Head of Serials Donald Wilson, noted that ‘each story will have a strong informational core based on fact’. During incoming Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s period in office there was a focus on educational opportunity for all, culminating in the establishment of the Open University, a government-backed distance-learning project. The growth of comprehensive schooling was another feature of the 1964–1970 Labour government, with Doctor Who’s historical tales loosely reflecting topics featured in history lessons in UK schools. The Newsom Report (Half Our Future, which led to the setting up of the Plowden Committee on primary and secondary education), published in October 1963, had promoted the development of a coherent national curriculum, including history alongside geography and social studies in a subject dubbed ‘The Proper Study of Mankind’. It included a call for pupils to develop ‘an ability to enter imaginatively into other men’s minds’ and added that ‘people make history. It is an enlarging of the spirit for our boys and girls to meet great men…’ The report’s words are a clear mission statement for many of Doctor Who’s early historical adventures.
Sydney Newman’s ho
pe was that Doctor Who should be informative, as well as entertaining. Early episodes saw the past depicted as an exotic background for the characters’ adventures, much the same as the early science-fiction stories. The fact that much of the historical subject matter (the French Revolution, the Romans and the Greeks would all be tackled) reflected the 1960s UK school history curriculum was a happy coincidence, rather than the result of any formal planning. Although Newman was clear about the show’s educational remit – ‘I was intent upon it containing basic factual information that could be described as educational, or at least mind-opening’ – producer Verity Lambert was more focused on attracting an audience, especially in the wake of the reaction to the Daleks.
As we have seen, it was no accident that the two main human audience-identification figures were schoolteachers covering history and science. The characters of Barbara and Ian allowed the writers to fill in the background to an episode, whether historical or scientific, in a way that felt natural to the drama. Lambert saw Newman’s loose educational remit bringing the show some prestige. ‘We were going backwards and forwards in time,’ Lambert told Doctor Who Magazine #234. ‘Although our people could go back in time and observe, they could never change the course of history. It was a wonderful way of teaching, and certainly we had a lot of letters from teachers who said they’d asked their classes to watch those particular episodes.’
Timeless Adventures Page 4