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!”
“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: “Of course, the decimal system hasn’t started yet…”
“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.
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.
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?”
“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...“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?”
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…
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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