Saturday, 24 November 2012

Hartnell Watch: An Unearthly Child (Series 1, Episode 1)

As excitement builds for the half-century anniversary of the Doctor Who franchise, it’s worth pointing out that it yesterday, it was just one year until we find out what Steven Moffat has planned for the show’s fiftieth. Maybe, just maybe, Moffat will actually give us some answers for the first time in his Producership.
But enough of my grouching. If it was one year until the 50th anniversary yesterday, that means that it was also Doctor Who’s 49th! And so, in celebration, I decided that there had been enough negativity on this blog. It was time to get to the heart of why I love this mighty show so much. And that meant going back right to the beginning, to my favourite era of the programme: the time of the First Doctor, played by William Hartnell. It’s time to sit back and enjoy how it all began…


When reviewing the very first story, many people choose to divide the four- parter into episode one, An Unearthly Child, and episodes two, three and four, titled The Cave of Skulls, The Forest of Fear and The Firemaker respectively, and with fairly good reason. An Unearthly Child, a name most people today give to the story as a whole, concentrates solely on the efforts of two schoolteachers, Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) as they work to unravel the mystery of one of their pupils, Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford), who claims to live in a junkyard, deserted but for the conspicuous presence of a Police Telephone Box, which seems to hum as if it were alive…
Possibly the most unassuming cultural icon ever.



Going on just the twenty-five minutes of this opening episode alone, it’s abundantly clear why the imaginations of a generation were collectively gripped right from the start. Even almost five decades on, this is an electrifying piece of television, from the unsettling opening pan across the junkyard to the ominously humming Police Box, which then disorientatingly cuts straight to the kitchen-sink realism of Coal Hill School.

As soon as Ian and Barbara appear onscreen together, it’s obvious why Russell T Davies would choose to focus squarely on the companion when reviving the show 42 years later. However, now that the comparison has been made, it’s hard to deny that the 1963 method is superior. Whereas Rose Tyler would just kind of stumble into being rescued by the Ninth Doctor, here we see Ian and Barbara taking a dynamic and proactive role, sharing their concerns about their mysterious new pupil, questioning her about her home life, and then following her back to the junkyard in a way that totally doesn’t look creepy at all to a twenty-first century audience.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we come to any of that, we are faced with the spellbinding brilliance that is the acting talent of William Russell and Jacqueline Hill. Straight away, Ian and Barbara are introduced as nuanced, realistic characters, a pair of teachers who view their pupils with a mixture of concern and good- natured exasperation. The wonderful chemistry, evident even here, between the two actors also gives the impression that they’re flirting with each other, not for the last time…
A love left forever unsaid... well, onscreen, at least.
Throughout the scenes where Ian and Barbara follow Susan back to the junkyard, we also get a series of flashbacks to incidents with Susan in the classroom- Ian teaches her science, while Barbara teaches her history, two subjects where the girl seems incredibly knowledgeable in some areas, but shockingly ignorant in others. The flashback scenes are remarkably well- shot, focusing close in on Susan’s face while the sound of other pupils laughing fills the air, emphasising her isolation and difference from the rest of the school.
 
Although even I have to admit that this scene contains the worst fake laughter I have ever heard. There's one guy in the foreground literally just saying "Ha ha ha ha ha."
Speaking as someone with an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the show, I feel compelled to highlight the lines during these scenes that, in hindsight, never fail to send a chill down my spine. First of all, there’s Barbara’s description of Susan’s home:
“There’s a big wall on one side, houses on the other, and nothing in the middle. And that nothing in the middle is number 76 Totters Lane!”

Or Susan’s delightfully prescient faux pas in History:
“Of course, the decimal system hasn’t started yet…”
But the real kicker is an argument about dimensions between Susan and Ian, that, for the first time, really starts to hint at what this show will be about:
“You can’t simply work on three of the dimensions!”
Three of them? Ah, Time being the fourth, I suppose? …Then what do you make the fifth dimension?”
To which Susan whispers: “…Space.”


So, having worked painstakingly to build up a strong, grounded sense of realism for this show, we travel into the junkyard… and everything is turned utterly on its head. Susan vanishes, and the only thing out of place that Ian and Barbara can find… is a gently humming police box. Interesting, too, to note that the first thing ever said about the TARDIS, when Ian lays his hand on it, is: “It’s alive!”

But, even as they wonder if Susan is trapped inside, and attempt to gain entry, a strangely dressed old man enters the junkyard and heads towards them…
And enter the single most iconic character in British television history...
Much has been said about William Hartnell, and how much this early version of the Doctor as an antagonistic, rude, bitter old man differs from everything that came afterwards. In almost every way, the First Doctor is the least “Doctorish” as we think of the character today. And yet, no other portrayal of the Doctor has ever anything close to the same level of screen presence that Hartnell can conjure up just by walking into a room, or picking up an object. And this all comes down to something that a new viewer to Hartnell-Who can’t help but notice: the theatricality of the acting.

You see, the story of Doctor Who is the story of television itself. From the medium’s birth as recorded stage plays, through decade after decade of improved special effects, each era of the show has a story to tell about how television programmes were viewed. The First Doctor’s era is indeed the theatrical age: sets were minimalistic, the backgrounds of countless alien worlds and times were paintings (something which, owing to the black and white image, it’s incredibly easy not to notice), while characters would have ‘asides,’ where they would walk about a metre away and speak their thoughts aloud. None of the other characters would hear them, of course, because that’s the way it worked in the theatre. The contrast with even the Second Doctor’s era is astonishing- just three years later, television production had moved on to incorporate full sets, naturalistic dialogue, and, most noticeably, location filming. And so it goes on: the Third Doctor’s era is the beginning of experimentation with green-screening and ‘message’ shows; the Fifth Doctor’s era sees the first attempts of television to tell movie-style stories; the Sixth Doctor’s time is a continuation of this, a period of ultra-violence and horror that tested censorship rules of the time, while also attempting long running story arcs for the first time. The Seventh Doctor’s era is a time of post-modernism, when television had reached an age where it could afford to be reflective on itself and its impact. The era most difficult to categorise is the Fourth Doctor’s, because it went on for so long, but I see it as basically one long, ultimately successful, attempt to stay relevant.

Anyway, erm, I’m not sure where that came from, other than a desire to once and for all put my finger on why this show has fascinated me for so long. Anyway, the mysterious old man tries to fob Ian and Barbara off and get them to leave, but after hearing Susan call from inside the Police Box, the schoolteachers force their way inside, and find themselves, for the first time, within the TARDIS.
Yes, the outside of the TARDIS doors, when seen from the inside, are the same roundels as the rest of the craft, instead of, say, the doors of a Police Box. It's one of those things that makes absolutely no sense, and yet will continue for the next twenty six years...
This, the first of many interior sets for the TARDIS, is an absolute thing of beauty: for most of the show’s run, the console room would simply be the main console, the scanner, and that would be it, so the most striking thing about this room is its sheer size. This feels like a time-spaceship you could live in: there are chairs, clocks, rows of computer banks, and bedrooms and food dispensers we won’t discover until the following story. There’s even a little study for the Doctor set into the wall ‘behind’ the camera that won’t be seen until The Web Planet, a year and a half later.

But for now, the focus is entirely on characterisation, as Ian and Barbara desperately try to make sense of what they have stumbled across. Susan pleads with the old man to let them go, but the stranger, now revealed as Susan’s grandfather, the Doctor, is adamant that they must remain, for fear that they will tell the world of what they have found. So, the very first episode of Doctor Who is the story of two adults who follow a young teenager home, but are in turn abducted by her mad grandfather.
"I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it!" In fact, aside from a few moments of rare compassion from the Second and Fourth Doctors, the idea that he in any way likes human beings only started with Tennant.
Anyway, it’s in these scenes, where Ian aggressively asserts that the TARDIS interior must be an illusion, Barbara tries to get Susan to leave with them, and the Doctor mocks their ignorance, that the dialogue goes into overdrive. Put simply, the script is perfect in every way. The scene is filled with gems such as the Doctor’s famous line:
“Have you ever thought what it’s like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? To be exiles?”

There’s also the other famous line, which surprised me by actually being at the start of the next episode; I was just expecting it to be here, in these initial arguments:
“If you could touch the alien sand, and hear the cries of strange birds, and watch them wheel in another sky… would that satisfy you?”
Personally, though, I’ve always loved the conversation between Ian and the Doctor that immediately precedes it:
“Time doesn’t go round and round in circles! You can’t get on and off whenever you like!”
“Really? Where does time go, then?”
But for now, there’s more highlights of the Doctor’s early characterisation as a malevolent kidnapper, such as his setting of the console to electrocute Ian when he touches it, for no real reason other than spite. It’s brilliantly unsettling, perhaps even more so to a casual viewer used to the cuddly Doctor of later incarnations. Oh, and Susan apparently invented the name 'TARDIS.' Which explains why every other Time Lord with a time machine we shall meet will also call their craft a TARDIS...

Finally, the Doctor loses patience and sets the TARDIS to take off with Ian and Barbara still on board, whisking them off into two years of wonders and delights beyond imagining…
The greatest testament to William Hartnell as an actor is that he, an experienced actor of stage and film, was presented with something which could so easily have been a throwaway 'madman' role on a short-lived kids' TV show based on a totally bonkers premise... and yet he sets the benchmark for every Doctor after him by taking it utterly seriously.
Oh, I’m sorry, I mean two years of an utterly mental nightmarish existence. Because, as we shall see, the early years of this cheap and cheerful kids’ programme were the darkest and most gritty it would ever be. And, as a shadow falls across a strange rocky landscape upon which the TARDIS now stands, the adventure is only just beginning…
Speaking for myself, I've always been able to invest totally in this as an actual Stone Age landscape. And if you can't, it says more about you than it does about the show.
Hmmm, what else about this very first episode haven’t I mentioned yet? Oh, yeah. The theme tune. Well, what can I say about it, other than that it became the sound of the nightmares of a million children? It’s impossible to overstate just how completely different and alien this would have been to a 1963 audience. And that goes for the show as a whole.
 

A much more concise and ordered review of the following three episodes coming soon…

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