Note: As anyone following Doctor Who, even now, knows, most of the episodes were - and to some extent still are - part of an overall story, or as the BBC liked to call them, serials. This led to some potentially good cliff-hangers and the iconic screech that presaged the end of that episode, as we’d all gasp and wonder what would happen next week (shows were always, but always, back at this time shown once a week, no repeats or downloads, so you were left waiting seven days). Therefore I will be noting both the name of the episode and the serial it fits into.
Further note: in the collection I downloaded there is an unaired pilot, but as it was never seen on TV, for now I’m going to ignore it. I may check it out at some point, I may not, but in general I want to start where it all began, as the show was broadcast to a somewhat shocked and shaken TV audience who had just heard the terrible news about the American President’s death.
Title of episode: “An Unearthly Child”
Title of Serial: An Unearthly Child
Part: 1 of 4
Doctor: William Hartnell
Companion(s): Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright
Written by: Anthony Coburn and C.E. Webber
Original air date: November 23 1963
Okay, it’s good to hear the original scary (!) theme, which has been diluted over the decades and now just sounds, well, like a theme tune. But back then it was spooky, eerie and otherworldly, and you were left in no doubt as to what was coming up. Like the theme to
The Onedin Line, Star Trek or
Kojak, the music that identified a TV show was often your first indication that the show was starting, as you might be outside making tea or just coming in from school, or making your way back in from the garden after burying the body of the latest teenage girl you had - what? You didn’t? But I thought everyone… ? No? Ah. I… see. Well in that case, forget what I said. No, no: look into this light.
Now, where was I? Oh yes. Burying the - NO! No, no no. Can you just look again… thanks.
Theme tunes. Yes. Definitely. Quite exciting to hear the first lonely notes of
Star Trek or the thump-thump of
Black Beauty, or the country jamboree that heralded the start of the
Dukes of Hazzard, and when you heard Woo-woo! WOO-Woo! Woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo!” you knew the Doctor was in the house. Sorry.
But back to this first episode, which as you can see above is part one of a four-part serial, this episode carrying the title of the serial. A refugee from
Dixon of Dock Green sets the scene and the pattern for most episodes in at least season one, if what I’m told is true, as he wanders around confused and lost in a thick London particular, or fog. He’s probably wondering how he stumbled onto this set, where the robbers in the stripy jumpers are with their bags of swag slung over their shoulder, and whether or not he should be calling and asking where Car 54 is. If you don’t get any of that, I hate you, as you’re too young. Eventually something emerges out of the fog; it’s a gate, and again with a sense of unintentional irony, it announces the presence of a scrap merchant. The gate swings open, though it’s not clear as to whether our intrepid copper has pushed it open, or if he’s buggered off to see if he can cadge a cup of tea from a neighbour in exchange for a few rounds of “Evenin’ all.” Shut up; I said you’re too young. Go look it up.
Behind this gate, anyway, we find a police box. Nothing odd about that, you say. Oh, you don’t say? You know all about it do you? Well why aren’t you writing this, smartarse? Yeah, obviously this is the famous TARDIS, the first time anyone has seen it, and to be fair, it is kind of odd that it’s in a scrap merchant’s yard, although I suppose it could have been brought in there by Steptoe and Son (if I have to explain one more time that you’re too young there’ll be ears getting clipped, my lad. Oh give me strength! It’s an old phrase that… you know what? Forget it. Just be quiet and listen, maybe you’ll learn something) but at any rate there it stands. Oh look! Poor old C.E. Webber doesn’t get a credit, as the, um, credits come up. I see Anthony Coburn wrote the rest of it, parts two, three and four, so maybe he felt that as he was doing the lion’s share of the writing Mr. Webber could just **** off. Or maybe the BBC didn’t have the budget to show two writers. Or they wanted to pretend it didn’t take two people to write this trash. Or they imagined the kids wouldn’t care, which I guess they didn’t.
Scene change, and we’re at school, where we meet a scientist, possibly but probably not mad, who is the first to speak, thereby I guess making history as being, you know, the first actual voice we hear on the first episode of the show. The cop either wasn’t paid to talk or decided his superiors would take a dim view of it, but in reality there was nobody to talk to, and a cop talking to himself might work well down at Dock Green, but up here in London that sort of thing can get you transferred to the Vehicle Licencing Department in Swansea, where you’ll spend the best years of your career stamping permits and trying to avoid close-harmony male voice choirs, and where every customer begins their request with “Look you.” The scientist looks like he ended up there due to his mind having been so much on weighty subjects that he wandered in there by accident, and has been so embarrassed that he hasn’t been able to find his way out, and has had to become a teacher to cover up. He’s talking to another teacher, and between them they fill in the details every avid kid viewer couldn’t give a curse about. Get to the aliens! Give us monsters! And for the older ones, the girls in the short skirts please! What do you mean, this isn’t
Star Trek?
The upshot of their, to be fair, reasonable conversation is that one student, a Susan Foreman, is known to be a genius at history and science (the science teacher says she knows more about it than him) and lives at home with her grandfather, but the other teacher, a woman, says that when she went to talk to him there was nothing at the address except… an old junk yard. Hey, nice connection! Give us monsters! Yeah yeah, cool yer jets kids. We’re getting there. Possibly. The two teachers decide to shadow Susan home, as the male teacher is convinced the “poor silly woman” got the address wrong, one has to make allowances for these feather-headed fillies, you know, oh yes, dear me, forget their own pretty little heads if they weren’t tightly screwed. Er, on. Yes. On. Screwed on. Rather. Ahem. Is it hot in here, or is it just me?
Anyway off they go, having given Susan a book on the French Revolution, rather imaginatively titled
The French Revolution, which she reads and says to herself “That isn’t right!” She of course ends up at the scrap yard, and Mr. Science Teacher has to admit that, dash it, the gel may have been right after all! How extraordinary! Still, doubtless it’s nothing a chap can’t figure out, with our superior brains and our sensible suits and haircuts, and perhaps a pipe on occasion. As the intrepid pair follow the unsuspecting Susan into the junk yard, the female teacher (neither have been named; I’m not being lazy here) shivers that she feels a sense of foreboding, that they are about to interfere in something best left alone. “Don’t you feel it?” she asks her opposite number, who sadly doesn’t quip “How could I, my dear? I’m in front of you! Besides, I am a
gentleman!”
Ok, now they’ve been named. She’s Miss Wright (ah now! Seriously?) and he’s Mr. Chesterton. More unintentional hilarity and innuendo for me when, having discovered the police box, Chesterton places his palm on the wood and exhorts Miss Wright to “Feel it!” She then talks about vibrations, oh ho ho, all good clean fun, but not for those of us with warped minds in need of a deep clean. Chesterton then uses the old Frankenstein quote and gasps “It’s alive!” Quite why he says this about a wooden box is beyond me. I could understand maybe “it’s live”, barely, but “it’s alive?” Weird, and just does not sit right. About to go and “find a policeman” (wonder if that wandering copper has finished his tea and Digestive biscuits down at number seven yet?) the two suddenly hide as they hear a coughing, and out from the police box emerges the man who will make history as the very first Doctor, William Hartnell, sounding like he should be sealed up in a wooden box all right, but horizontally. Definitely a touch of the vampire about him. Susan's voice calls out to her grandfather, to nobody’s surprise, given the tell-don’t-show conversation between the two teachers earlier.
Showing perhaps admirable courage, although then again this is an old man, so hardly likely to fell them with a Kung-Fu kick, which has not been invented yet (or not known in the west, which for us is the same thing of course), the two teachers stride purposely forward and demand to know where Susan is. They believe her voice came from within the box, but the old man rejects their suggestions and basically tells them to **** off, sixties style. A younger man might get a threat of a “bunch of fives”, but no strong fit young science teacher is going to hit an old guy, so the obvious thing to do is, as Miss Wright suggested earlier, get a policeman. They’re going to spoil his tea, they are.
Oh. No they’re not. Have another Digestive, Constable. Susan, worried about her grandfather, opens the door and the two teachers shoulder their way in (well, he shoulders his way in and she tags along) to find - gasp! Some sort of spaceship! Right. We will say it once, and then never speak of it again. Ready? Together then. One, two, three… “It’s bigger inside than outside!” Yes of course it is. Decent enough set really, given that it was basically thrown together at the last minute as a way to get the producers off the designer’s back so he could concentrate on more important stuff. Miss Wright betrays an annoying sense of matter-of-factness, seeming to brush off the whole idea of, you know, there being a spaceship inside a wooden police box, more concerned with who Susan’s grandfather is and that she lives here. It’s a tad unconvincing and just a little too stiff-upper-lip-don’t-let-the-side-down British really.
Susan is the one to first use the now-famous acronym, one she coined, telling her teachers the police box is a TARDIS, and can move through time and space. Not surprisingly, they find this hard to believe, but the irascible old grandfather, the Doctor who has not yet been called that, grins and says he knew they wouldn’t understand. Turns out they’re both aliens (duh), Susan and her grandfather, exiles from their home planet. Hey! If he’s a timelord does that make her a timelady? Or being young, is she more a timegirl? Hmm. She’s very excitable, which I suppose complements the calm, unbothered air of the Doctor who (sorry) has not yet been called that. At least while Chesterton runs around saying it can’t be true, Miss Wright is a little more rational, saying that Susan and her grandfather are “playing a game”, which is marginally better I guess. But now the Doctor has decided neither of these two can leave with his secret, and they must die.
Or, you know, become his companions along with Susan. Either is good I guess. And so, with some very dodgy effects which sort of look like someone spilled paint down the screen, we’re off! Off to a new world of wonders and terrors. Or, well, to the go-to location for the BBC: a disused quarry. And we have just enough left in the budget to have an unpaid stagehand walk across the sand and throw his elongated shadow in as menacing a way as possible (not very) before the next episode kicks in. Can we stand the suspense?
