DW50: 1963-1966: William Hartnell's Era.

"It all started off as a mild curiosity in a junk yard, but it's turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure."

People often ponder whether The Doctor could be played by a woman, with responses ranging from the perfectly reasonable “I worry that the dynamic and character at the heart of the series would be changed too much by that,” to the eminently stupid “No. No. That would be the worst thing ever! I’m never watching again. Bring back David Tennant!” I believe the Doctor cannot be played by a woman for one simple reason: As of November the Doctor will be 50 years old so if he was a woman the BBC would definitely fire him. (Actually he’s closer to 1,250 years old, but hey, I’d lie about my age to snog Karen and Jenna too.) I have a blog, and have seen an episode of Doctor Who so I am forced by the laws of the internet to do a look back at those last 50 years.

Doctor Who started, late, in 1963. President John F. Kennedy, whose cruel parents named him after the airport he was conceived in, was killed the day before, appropriately enough by his future self (for evidence, see the first episode of Red Dwarf series 7 and tell me of a more convincing conspiracy theory), and so the news over ran. So Doctor Who had a presidential assassination to follow, which is a tough gig, but almost 50 years later I would have to watch the end of every episode of Don’t Scare The Hare which is infinitely more distressing than repeated footage of a man being shot in the head and I still enjoyed Doctor Who afterwards. (If you don’t remember Don’t Scare The Hare you are one of the lucky ones. It was a quiz show where contestants must avoid scaring a giant robotic hare…Anticipating your next question: I don’t know. Nobody does.)

So slightly later than scheduled some black and white weirdness and some strange noises heralded the arrival of a new TV sensation. The original Doctor Who theme tune is the most effectively strange and alien sound the show has produced. Unlike todays, overcrowded theme tune with so much noise going on, it’s quiet, simple, and electronic in a way that gives it an eerily unnatural tone. This is a horrible cliché in the world of Doctor Who blogging, but it’s never really been as good as the original. It’s just plain weird, as all of the sixties seem to people my age. When it was mentioned in the news that some of Doctor Who was dreamed up on LSD, I found it very hard to believe nobody had mentioned that before. Many of the special effects team seemed to be on LSD in the 1960s with glorious results, while in the 1980s much of the costume department also seemed to be on LSD with…results. Let’s just leave it at that. Even the images – strange swirls like clouds flying past (you know what I’m just gonna put a link to a YouTube video in this) – are a bit like something I imagine you might see on acid. The basicness of it helps it feel more alien. In some ways it’s not as exciting as the brightly coloured time-tunnel with the names of actors whooshing through it of the Russell T Davies era, or the asteroids flying at you left right and centre in the Paul McGann movie, or the EVERYTHING happening that Moffat debuted at Christmas. But it is exciting. It’s exciting because it’s creepy, it’s even a little bit unsettling. Simple and yet strange, not just a possible title for my autobiography, also something Doctor Who does very well.

But to the first episode itself: An Unearthly Child. Also called 100,000 B.C. by people who are wrong. Ok, I know there’s a lot of debate who-fans, but if it says An Unearthly Child on the DVD box, then that’s what it’s called. Sorted. Debate over. Simple. So, right, it’s a new sci-fi show. It’s Doctor Who, what are we expecting? Well in 1963 we were at least expecting a doctor who we would certainly be curious about. And it delivered on that promise with a character played by William Hartnell. Hartnell was 55 years old when he first started playing the Doctor, but to look at him you would think he was in his sixties at least. That’s partly down to his wonderful acting and partly, latterly, down to his illness and fumbling of lines (more on those later). If William Hartnell had been any other Doctor than number 1, his performance would have been the most ground-breaking and felt the most different of any Doctor. It’s William Hartnell’s performance that makes me understand why the writers thought to experiment with making Colin Baker’s Doctor unlikeable – I’ll cover that in blog 6, don’t you worry.

Basically The Doctor, in his first incarnation, is the anti-hero more than the hero. He has three companions in this first series. His second and third companions Ian and Barbara are both schoolteachers at the school where his first companion, his granddaughter Susan, is being taught having been exiled from their home world, Gallifrey, for reasons yet to be made clear. Ian and Barbara become companions, because the Doctor kidnaps them. They come looking for Susan, who they have concerns about, and stumble into the TARDIS and the Doctor decides he can’t let them go and tell the world about aliens and time-machines and so whisks them off to 100,000 BC. Later in the story, when they’re forced to run away, Ian and Barbara stop to save a wounded caveman so The Doctor picks up a stone with the intention of hitting the caveman about the bonce, killing him and leaving them free to run away. And he would have got away with it too, if it wasn’t for Ian stopping him. What a prick! It’s hard to imagine any other Doctor being that callous. I can’t see Matt Smith doing it, or David Tennant doing it without an episode of crying, self-reflection, guilt and self-loathing following it until he does something stupid and realises he goes too far sometimes. Still by episodes 12 and 13, the companions would be threatening to stab each other with scissors and The Doctor who be putting drugs in their tea – it was a very different world back then. Ian is the hero of the series and The Doctor is played as, if not a bad guy, certainly a ruthless one. Watching those early episodes as a fan, it’s hard to make sense of some of the Doctor’s actions. He’s clearly the brains of the operation but he’s just a bit of a knob too. He’s rude. He deliberately gets Ian’s name wrong like he would later do with Mickey. In his own words nine bodies later “I was trying to be old and grumpy and important, like you do when you’re young.” I like to think that these are the Doctor’s first adventures, the ones that turn him into a hero. Sure, the reason he stole the TARDIS might have been pretty brave and heroic and it says that he’s visited places before 1960s Earth, but these could be the first times he’s got involved. Actually, quite a few of the first Doctor’s adventures deal with him not helping to save the world, just getting caught up in some story. Actually a lot of first Doctor adventures are basically about saving himself and his companions and having a bit of fun with history along the way. And there is real character development in this incarnation of the Doctor, by the time he comes to regenerate he’s a very different man. He transforms over the years from cantankerous old sod to Grandfatherly nice-guy who gets a bit confused as often as he gets cross.

So that’s the Doctor, his key character traits are being cross, making odd “mmmhmmm” noises and getting Ian’s name wrong to annoy him. Chesterfield, being my favourite example. But what else would we expect from the first episode of a new sci-fi show. Well, it was billed as an adventure in all of time and space, so I guess we’d be expecting an adventure in time and space. WRONG! Ok, not that unusual in Doctor Who aliens often invade present day Earth. WRONG! Aside from The Doctor and Susan, there are no aliens in Doctor Who until episode 5 which to its credit gives us three! One is an unconvincing fossilised robot, one we only see a hand of and the third we only see a skink plunger of, but 5 episodes in and the aliens start turning up, not a bad pace. Downton is on its third season now, and I haven’t seen so much as a funny light in the sky yet. In fact, episode 1 features no characters apart from The Doctor and his four companions (I should say for the benefit on NEW-Who fans, that in those days episodes were 20minutes long and most stories were 4-6 parters, but the length varied.) and a few extras (a whistling policeman and some jeering students). The whole thing is only two scenes and a handful of brief flashbacks: One of Ian and Barbara looking for Susan in a junkyard and finding a police box, a detail that turns out to be surprisingly relevant when they go inside the police box and discover – you’ll never guess what – it’s bigger on the inside. The second half of the episode revolves around the Doctor deciding what to do with these intruders, in the end he takes them back in time and they spend episodes 2-4 being kidnapped by, threatened by, worshipped by and running away from cavemen, though not necessarily in that order. It’s one of a type of adventure the show hasn’t done since the 60s (except Black Orchid) a purely historical story where The Doctor gets involved in historical events. The Romans being another good example in which Ian and Barbara are sold into slavery and the Doctor is mistaken for a musician and forced to perform at Nero’s court which he promptly accidentally burns down. It’s pure farce, but a lot of fun. Or The Gunfighters where the Doctor needs a dentist and so visits the Wild West (tbf, it’s probably the closest to my house you’d find an NHS dentist these days) where his dentist turns out to be a gunslinger leading the Doctor and co to the gunfight at the OK Corral via a tortuous musical number. This is a direct result of somebody boring deciding that the show had to be educational and not just a load of bug-eyed monsters. Luckily Terry Nation ignored that man and having escaped the cavemen The Doctor finds himself in a seven parter battling The Daleks who would return in the second series and launch the Dalekmania craze.

By the way, what the first five episodes lack in aliens they more than make up for in episode titles:
1) An Unearthly Child
2) The Cave Of Skulls (as creepy as it sounds. Good props guys in those days…gave their lives so their skulls could decorate this set)
3) The Forest Of Fear
4) The Firemaker
All of which, I hope make you realise that purely historical episodes could be bloody exciting too. Episode 5 is called The Dead Planet by the way.

Ok, so the pacing and effects were maybe not the same as today, (it’s hard to see Steven Moffat turning Asylum Of The Daleks into a 12-part story like Daleks’ Master Plan though I could well imagine him sticking in a Christmas special that makes no sense halfway through.) but the excellent Babelcolour on YouTube was set a challenge to make a dramatic exciting trailer for the first Doctor like he had with the more action-packed seventh Doctor’s era. Here’s the result, I think it proves that Doctor Who has always been pretty darn exhilarating:

Time was called for the first Doctor in 1966. Hartnell’s health was deteriorating (he had arteriosclerosis and struggled to learn his lines) and so at the end of the second story of the fourth series, The Tenth Planet, the first doctor became the second doctor. You make sense of that last sentence, I’m busy! At the end of the episode he collapsed in the TARDIS saying that “This old body of mine’s wearing a bit thin,” not the most heroic death. David Tennant’s guess at his last line: “Oh I’m a bit knackered” on Celebrity Mastermind is not far off.

Doctor Who began with some of its most innovative and inventive stories. Purely historical stories mixed with sci-fi adventures. It was all a great adventure back in those days, but there were emotional bits too. I’ll mention one in a minute. Companions left the Doctor; by the end of series 2 none of his original companions were left. It introduced the Daleks and the Cybermen and made both very credible and terrifying villains on a 60s budget and used it’s multi-part stories to tell complex tales, up to 12 parts long. But then the Doc was feeling old and tired and so the torch had to be passed on.

Hartnellisms – The Best of the Outtakes That Didn’t Get Taken Out

The Doctor speculates that maybe the pills left outside the TARDIS were “Anti-radiation gloves…drugs.” Though to be fair, he had taken a massive dose of radiation poisoning in a Dalek prison at the time, you try and remember your lines under that stress. That would be an “impossibissibility”

“I’m not a mountain goat and I prefer walking to any day…I hate climbing.”

“If you had your shoes on boy you could have lent her hers.”

If this all seems a bit terrible, he’s sorry but “I can’t improve at this very moment…..I can’t prove at this moment…”

“The Daleks will stop at anything to prevent us!” Very reasonable of them.

And my favourite: “You’ll end up a couple of burnt cinders flying around in Spain!....in space!"

First Doctor: Episodes to Watch

1. An Unearthly Child – The first ever episode, introduces the Doctor and the world of Doctor Who in a clever and brave way. Four characters, one central mystery: Doctor Who? A question that still hasn’t been answered. And a purely historical tale with cavemen and a terrifying prison full of skulls. Brave and exciting stuff.

2.       The Time Meddler – The Conclusion to series 2, and the first time we meet another Timelord with a TARDIS of his own. This Timelord though has intentions that aren’t quite as honourable as the Doctors. Called The Meddling Monk he’s interfering with history in 1066 for his own profit. Big Finish recently bought him back alongside the eighth Doctor, but I can’t help but feel he’s one of the great underused characters in Doctor Who. Basically he’s just a trouble maker. This episode also has some of the best funny lines in the first Doctor’s era, including:
Doctor: “A Viking helmet.”
Steven: “Could be.”
Doctor: “What do you think it is? A space helmet for a cow?”
And the Doctor explaining the TARDIS to his new companion:

3.       The Dalek Invasion Of Earth – If you only watch one first Doctor episode make it this one. Easily the best. It’s the second appearance of the Daleks and (spoiler warning) the first time a companion leaves the show. The tale of the Daleks enslaving mankind and attempting to turn Earth into a giant spaceship is gripping if a mental plan on the Daleks part. The scenes of a deserted London as Daleks glide across Tower Bridge and the Royal Albert Hall among other London landmarks are genuinely eerie, and the story has an epic scale with The Doctor and co fighting the Daleks all over southern England.
But the subplot that has Susan fall in love with resistance fighter David and ultimately leave the Doctor is also expertly done and woven subtly around the main plot, leading to the most-remembered and emotional moment in the first Doctor’s era where he locks Susan out of the TARDIS at the end of the story, so she won’t have to choose between him and David. The Doctor’s speech disproves the theory some have that emotional exits are something unique to modern-Who.

One to avoid

The Edge Of Destruction

Not a terrible story, though it is pretty weak, but certainly not one I’d suggest you watch as your first encounter with Doctor #1. It’s a pretty radical story, for budgetary reasons. Again it features only the four main characters and is set entirely within the TARDIS. The good points of the story are that we learn a lot about the characters and their feelings towards one another. We also get our first hints that the TARDIS is much more than simply a machine. As something gets into the heads of the characters and turns them against each other. This is the one I mentioned earlier where The Doctor drugs everyone else and where Susan threatens to stab Barbara with some scissors. It’s a creepy episode, a lot of it is shot in darkness, however you never quite feel like it’s not all taking place on a cheap set in the studio – obviously not their fault, and they did their best. And at two parts it is maybe a bit long for four people on one set. After much paranoia and suspicion about the nature of the threat it turns out that SPOILER ALERT: a button on the console got stuck. That’s it. That’s what all this bitterness between the companions was about. Not really good enough. Let’s down all the clever ideas and risk-taking this episode did.