Saturday Teatime #4: Marco Polo

Before we launch into this there are a few issues I'd like to address separately so they don't overshadow the story itself. The first is this story's status as the first missing story. Short version: in the Seventies the BBC dumped a lot of their film archive, literally incinerated it, to make space. There were logical reasons at the time: the BBC was moving to full colour broadcasting and anticipated no market for their black and white material in the future, there being no hint of home video at the time. There were also problems with the actor's union Equity, who lobbied to limit the number of repeats to keep their members in work, which as a hoary old socialist I can't really complain about.

So they dumped almost everything: Doctor Who episodes, historic Top Of The Pops performances, early episodes of Dad's Army and The Avengers, even their news reports of the moon landing ended up in the incinerator. This continued well into the era of colour and we'll be seeing how this affects Doctor Who right up to Season Eleven. Many of the destroyed episodes were later returned to the BBC by overseas TV stations who had failed to destroy their copies but there are still over ninety episodes missing, probably never to be seen again.

By sheer luck and the dedication of early fans every missing episode's soundtrack exists as off-air recordings. There are also “telesnaps”, which was a service provided by a man called John Cura who was retained by certain producers and directors to photograph their programs on transmission at a rate of a picture every few seconds.

Which brings us around to how I'm “watching” this story. A group of fans working under the collective name of Loose Cannon have produced a complete set of reconstructions using the soundtracks, telesnaps, surviving clips and even specially filmed inserts. These are as close to the original as we're ever likely to get in most cases so I'll be using them to experience the missing episodes, including the ones the BBC have animated. I heartily recommend them to anyone who wants the most authentic experience of the missing episodes currently (and likely ever) available.

There's also a colour version of Marco Polo, which I'm not using here for authenticity reasons, but that is absolutely amazing, this is such a beautiful story.

The other issue to address is race in this story, which is set in China and contains all of one Asian actor: Zienia Merton, who is Burmese on her mother's side. So, basically, there's one actor from the right continent and every other Chinese character is played in yellowface. I'm not addressing this separately to ignore the issue but there's a lot to say about this story and better, more complete stories where I can talk about race in the classic series. For the moment its something to note but I want to give it a proper essay down the line or at least wait for a more complete story featuring these issues so I have as much evidence to base my opinion on as possible (probably The Crusade) All that dealt with, let's actually talk about this story:

7 episodes

written by John Lucarotti

original broadcast 22^nd February to 4 April 1964

This is a long story. I don't think there's any way I'll get through this project without complaining about long stories a few times so I was pleasantly surprised by how little padding this one had. By the time we get to the Pertwee era, if not Season Five, I strongly suspect both you and I will be tired of me complaining about episodes that are just running in place and not advancing the plot. Here, though, the long runtime actually serves to give the story room to breathe. There's a whole section of an episode given over to Ping-Cho regaling the TARDIS crew with a Chinese folk tale. Its an interesting scene because aside from a little moment where Ian explains the etymology of the word assassin its entirely about Ping-Cho, the TARDIS crew are passive observers.

We should probably talk about Ping-Cho and her relationship with Susan. Ping-Cho is a teenage girl travelling to Kublai Khan's court as part of Marco caravan, headed for an arranged marriage with a very old court official. Its an interesting angle even if Lucarotti fails to stick the landing on it. More important, though, is Ping-Cho's relationship with Susan.

For one thing the relationship is so eminently slashable. Part of this is because of the limited evidence: almost every surviving image of the two young women involves them leaning close to one another, hugging or lounging in bed together in their tent (no, honestly). On a more serious note this is actually the only time that Susan is shown to have an extended relationship with someone her own age. I've talked before about how Susan's character gets kind of screwed over by having the three other main characters all be responsible for her so giving her a friend her own age is exactly what the character needs.

I genuinely think this is the best use of Susan so far, perhaps the best use of her in her entire run. The series at this stage still has a problem with writing the young: when Susan and Ping-Cho raise their suspicions about Tegana they are ignored and Ping-Cho is robbed of a resolution to her plot when it turns out her intended husband has died, saving her from a marriage she no longer wants by chance instead of her own actions. Also, as I say, in her ten story run this is the one and only time Susan has someone her own age to talk to, we didn't even see her interact with the other kids at Coal Hill School.

The guest cast as a whole is more important to this story than any other story so far, perhaps more than any other story in Season One and we're clearly meant to invest in them and even take their side at times. Mark Eden as Marco Polo is used as a narrator via the device of writing in his journal; we're obviously meant to side with him when Ian betrays his trust; and the climax of the serial is a big sword fight (brutally ill-served by the static telesnaps) between the Warlord Tegana and Marco Polo. The big confrontation isn't Ian's or the Doctor's but Marco's. In fact, the road to that final confrontation is paved largely by confrontations between Marco and Tegana. From the modern perspective where the Doctor is our clear-cut hero figure and absolutely the centre of the narrative (for better or worse) this comes off a little oddly.

Except, of course, running at seven episodes Marco, Ping-Cho and Tegana might as well be regulars. The series had only run thirteen episodes before their introduction and on original broadcast the audience would have seen these characters every week for nearly two months. True, regular viewers would know the actual series regulars better but seven weeks is a long time to watch a single cast of characters. These days that could be the length of an entire series, especially of a historical where budgets tend to favour shorter runs.

Of course, saying that we should probably address this story's “historical” credentials. This is Doctor Who's first brush with proper history as it features an actual historical figure instead of generic cavemen. This is where it gets tricky and I have to clear away some due diligence. Every Doctor Who story has a spotter's guide version that every fan knows after a while and for Marco Polo it is this: the geography of this story is terrible and the history is worse. Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood's About Time series actually spends time debating whether Mark Eden's character is even really meant to be Marco Polo, the representation of him is that far from reality, and the BBC soundtrack CD contained a map of the journey taken in the story with a note basically saying “Yes, we know Cathay wasn't actually this shape but the map had to follow the story not actual geography”. So, we have a historical figure who's nothing like he should be travelling through a representation of Cathay that doesn't even have the landmarks of the Silk Road in the right order.

Let me be clear, as far as I'm concerned this doesn't matter.

I am a huge fan of HBO's The Tudors, a series that picked up something of a reputation in the press for historical inaccuracy. Some of it was just the press being ignorant (they complained about Henry VIII being fit and handsome even though he didn't look like the Holbine painting until much later in life) but there were genuine alterations to history in that series. For instance, in the series Henry has one sister, Margaret, whilst in reality he had two, Margaret and Mary. However, neither did all that much that was useful to the plot so events from both their lives were conflated into the Margaret character. It made a better story and the producers were very up front about it. They also said that they hoped by creating an engaging story they could interest people in going out and reading about the history for themselves and I honestly believe this is the approach being taken by Lambert, Whitaker and Lucarotti here.

Yes, this is educational television but at the primary and secondary level, which is where this is pitching, details tend to be left out. Okay, a lot of details are being left out here but it isn't as if anyone was ever going to go back and fact check it. I mean, they have, but no one making the thing could have known they would. The best case scenario is that a child watches this, becomes interested and maybe remembers it vaguely enough that if and when the subject comes up at school they'll remember the broad sweep of things: that Marco Polo was a Venetian trader, that his family was a power in Kublai Khan's court, that the Silk Road crossed the Gobi Desert and so on. This wasn't meant to be used as a primary text and it certainly wasn't ever meant to be revisited.

And if we're going to talk about how useful accuracy is to a story let's consider this story's token science lesson where Ian and the Doctor explain condensation to a bewilderingly incredulous Marco. Its dull. Its very dull. Its not quite as bad as the stuck switch explanation that ended the last story but its getting there.

This moment does, however, represent something important and interesting. Before this exceptionally boring science lesson the Doctor has been unconscious for an episode in the TARDIS, affected by the same dehydration that is threatening to kill Marco's entire caravan. When he emerges bearing the condensed water that has been collecting on the TARDIS walls he's a very different man from the one Susan carried inside. As we noted back with the changes between the pilot and broadcast versions of An Unearthly Child, the production team did seem to have reservations from day one about the Doctor's initial hostile personality. After he emerges from his nap he's far less snappish and far more whimsical. It isn't a complete rewrite of the character but he is certainly more fun after this, a fact brought home when he repeatedly beats Kublai Khan at backgammon and is asked to list what the Khan owes:

“Thirty-five elephants with ceremonial bridles, trappings, brocades and pavilions; four thousand white stallions and twenty-five tigers […] and the sacred tooth of Buddha which Polo brought home from India […] I'm... I'm very much afraid all the commerce from Burma for one year, sire.”

This is the immediate legacy of Marco Polo: another step towards the Doctor becoming the hero of the series by becoming sympathetic instead of the aloof and dangerous alien we met in An Unearthly Child. There is one other legacy, though it is less immediate, indeed it won't bear fruit until the Nineties.

You see, The ending of this story deserves special mention because this is the first time something very important happens. Marco and Kublai Khan watch the TARDIS dematerialise and instead of switching to the Ship's interior for a quick cliffhanger to lead us into the next story we stay with Marco who delivers a charming little voiceover in which he wonders where his friends will end up next, the past or the future? Its the first time the narrative really leaves the TARDIS crew and creates the first continuity gap in the series, albeit one that could only be exploited if Ian fails to change his shirt for a while. Aside from the stories set before An Unearthly Child this is the first place Missing Adventures can be slotted in, which is going to be very important in about thirty years.

NEXT EPISODE: The Keys of Marinus... or is it?

Saturday Teatime #3: The Edge of Destruction

(Yes, I am calling this The Edge Of Destruction like the VHS, the DVD, the Doctor Who Magazine polls and, in fairness, the title card of the first episode. Yes, when I was growing up and fans were brought up proper this was called Inside The Spaceship but general social pressure seems to have out-voted me on that one.)

The Edge of Destruction

2 episodes

written by David Whitaker

originally transmitted 8^th - 15^th February 1964

An interesting thing about Doctor Who fandom is that we're as obsessed with how the series was made as we are about what makes it on screen. Doctor Who Magazine regularly carries whole-page articles about what order the next series is going to be filmed in. I subscribed to Star Trek Magazine for a while in the late 90s and they never went that far: they'd mention upcoming guest stars or the director if it was a cast member but things like production order never entered into it except when they needed to explain why actors remembered making episodes in the wrong order.

Production details are a big thing to Doctor Who fans, though, so I know that this two-parter has the production code Serial C; that it ends the initial thirteen episode run the BBC ordered before renewing the series for a full season; and that it is set entirely aboard the TARDIS and features only the four regular cast members because the series ran out of money.

Yes, this was a story made entirely to balance the books. Sets are expensive and hiring guest actors is time-consuming. In Star Trek this problem is easily solved: those series take place on starships or space stations with lots of standing sets and a cast of nine or ten characters. Doctor Who, by contrast, has a single standing set and a far smaller recurring cast. Even when its cast is at its largest in Season Eight there'll only be six regulars and one of those is the villain. Here we have four people, the console room set, the food machine room built for the first episode of The Daleks and whatever other space can be made by moving the walls around. On the plus side we have story editor David Whitaker on writing duties, a fact that will come to mean wonderful things in the future.

So it is with some reluctance I admit the opening of the story does not grab me, in fact I don't like it at all. I've only watched this story once before and these opening scenes are the reason why. At the end of The Daleks the TARDIS took off and everyone was knocked unconscious by an unexplained explosion. This story is about working out what's wrong with the TARDIS, sorting out the tensions between the four characters and delivering two science lessons of varying quality but first we get this horrible bit of time-consuming faffing about.

Okay, so everyone wakes up and all of them are acting odd: BRabara and Ian don't recognise the Doctor or the TARDIS; the Doctor is half-conscious and babbling; and Susan moves slowly and cautiously, reacting to everything on a time delay. The director is obviously going for weird and alienating but the simple fact is it comes across as nothing more than actors missing their cues and forgetting their lines. Considering we're talking about an era when scenes did go out where actors miss their cues and forget their lines this is deeply unfortunate. William Russell suffers the most. I don't think Russell is a bad actor but Ian is a very narrowly-written part who tends to switch between anger, amusement, bewilderment and very little else. Divorcing Ian even from that limited range and having him react to everything as if he has a concussion is not a recipe for success.

Then Susan threatens Ian with a pair of long-bladed scissors and proceeds to stab up a mattress whilst screaming hysterically. Not unnaturally, and here we return to the Doctor Who fan's deep knowledge of production history, this led to the series' first serious viewer complaints. The cavemen and Daleks might have been a bit too scary for some children but at least they weren't doing anything that could be imitated by kids. This is a character going nuts with a household implement you could actually kill someone with. These days the BBC has rules about “imitable violence” so that, for instance, when all the A-positives walk up on the roofs in The Christmas Invasion you won't see even a single child up there.

These opening scenes dominate my memory of my first viewing and I was glad to see that everyone aside from Susan settles down by the end of episode 1 and we get onto the meat of the story: the tensions between the crew.

Something is clearly wrong with the TARDIS, a fact communicated by odd incidents like the doors opening on their own, Susan fainting when she touches the console, and later on when the clock and everyone's watches begin to melt. Everything weird in this story is put down to the fault, which doesn't quite make sense. The idea, put forward by Barbara in an interpretation of events even Jacqueline Hill can't quite sell, is that the TARDIS is trying to communicate with its occupants that they're in danger. From this we get the origin of the idea that the TARDIS is sentient, or at least self-aware, though this theory suffers from a few holes. The first hole is that the Ship has chosen to communicate in the most obtuse, obscure manner possible considering that she knows her existence is under threat. The other is that at no point is the Great Mattress Scissor Massacre explained, Susan simply snaps out of her paranoia in time for the climax.

Here we come to the saving grace of the story because once you're past the jarring early scenes and the explanations that make no sense the four regulars put in strong performances. The big one is Barbara yelling at the Doctor when he accuses her and Ian of sabotage. She points out, stridently, that the Doctor would have been killed several times over if not for the two of them pulling his fat out of the fryer. Its powerful, its delivered with conviction and by the end of the story the Doctor is far more respectful of her. They have a lovely scene just before the end that has the Doctor offering her his arm. There's a respect there that will underlie the whole of their relationship from now on.

There are similarly powerful moments with Ian, including a moment where he graciously steps in and accepts the Doctor's contrition without forcing him to actually apologise. The two men are coming to an equality in their relationship which is just as well since the continuing softening of Hartnell's performance, especially in that last scene with Barbara, means he'll be ready to share Ian's leading man position just as soon as he's done becoming a hero. We'll get there but the hostility hasn't died completely yet. He's willing to throw Ian and Barbara out of the TARDIS when he thinks they're against him no matter where they've landed and in spite of Susan's objections.

Oh, yes, Susan, who doesn't get an apology of any kind. During the final crisis of the story the Doctor lies to Susan and Barbara, telling them they have more time than they actually do before the Ship is destroyed. Afterwards he doesn't apologise for this but he does concede to Barbara that she was right in her interpretation of events and from that moment things between the Doctor and Barbara settle down. He lied to Susan too, though, but even after everything the story puts Susan through she gets no apologies, no words of comfort, she's just expected to bounce back and forget that her grandfather came very, very close to abandoning and possibly murdering her teachers. Susan actually goes through more than most of the others in this story yet it isn't judged worthy of comment at the end.

An apology would certainly have been a better use of screen time between the Doctor and Susan than having him explain, for the second time in five minutes, how the whole problem with the TARDIS was down to a stuck switch.

Ah, yes, the Fast Return Switch, clearly labelled on the TARDIS console in felt tip. What stands out about this isn't the sheer low-tech degree of mechanical fault because complex mechanisms are broken by small faults all the time. No, what stands out is how boring the explanation is with the Doctor whipping out a pencil torch and using the on-button to demonstrate to Susan (who is, lest we forget, an alien genius from a society that can build time machines) how a switch works when it was entirely obvious what had happened from the dialogue the Doctor and Ian shared when they discovered the fault.

Worse, this scene follows Hartnell delivering a great speech to camera explaining how solar systems are formed through the accretion of matter which actually comes out quite poetic. We get a fun but largely useless science lesson (at least at the middle school level the series is currently pitching for) followed by a practical but unbelievably boring one. The educational aspect of the series isn't going to last long and this, even more than the condensation bit in the next serial, shows us exactly why. 

Saturday Teatime #2: The Daleks (aka The Mutants)

The Daleks
7 episodes
written by Terry Nation
originally transmitted 21st December 1963 - 1st February 1964

Once you read a few of these projects you start to see some common patterns emerging: just about everyone falls in love with Jacqueline Hill; everyone concludes that Susan was a flawed idea; and everyone ends up a bit down on Terry Nation.

This last one isn't entirely unfair. Nation's writing (and occasionally his work ethic) had some severe problems but he also had a writing career on Doctor Who extending from 1963 to 1979. Yes, this is mainly due to him holding the copyright on the Daleks and having first refusal to write any script where the BBC wanted to use them but there are other factors. He was commissioned to write a second script for the series before anyone decided the Daleks needed to return.

And you know what? I don't want to be down on Terry Nation. The first Doctor Who story I ever saw was Planet Of The Daleks and that story made me fall in love with the series. So here as we meet him and his most famous creations for the first time (sorry if you're the world's only massive Kraal fan) let's forget about the future and just enjoy ourselves. And that isn't difficult, there's a lot to like here and much of the Terry Nation Cliché Bingo Card fails to make an appearance (if nothing else it would be hard to self-plagiarise on your first script).

So let's give Nation some props because one thing he is absolutely fantastic at is set pieces. This is because his approach to science-fiction is very much in the 1950s Flash Gordon movie serial mode. Luckily, Nation's script is paired with a designer who realises this and turns in a bunch of sets and monsters that were a bit retro even in 1963 and so aged oddly well. Lucky for Nation, for us fans and for the survival of the series but considerably less so for designer Ray Cusick. Cusick was a fantastic designer who did a lot of work in the early years of the series, not least of which were the TARDIS console room and the Dalek casing. Everyone counts him as one of the series' most important visionaries. Everyone, that is, except Terry Nation, Terry Nation's lawyers and the BBC Royalties Payments Department.

Yes, it was a work-for-hire job and so he got a bonus (£50, I believe) because it was great work and received not a penny or even an on-screen credit since.

So the production is on the same page as the writer and in some cases several pages ahead. We're doing movie serial sci-fi from ten years ago here, which is probably a good thing to be doing on TV when no one had really done ongoing science-fiction before, there's at least a pattern to follow there. On this note its probably time to note that here my theme of “early Doctor Who was more modern than I thought” pretty much curls up and dies because no modern series would have Ian suggesting they all split up to search the seemingly deserted city without a post-modern joke asking if he'd ever seen a horror movie.

Good set pieces are a very important part of adventure serials, arguably the most important part. You get the set piece then a pause for some talky stuff to happen that sets up the next big set piece and after that cycle repeats a couple of times you get the cliffhanger. Nation turns in some very pacey numbers here: escaping the Dalek cell, the lift scene, and the expedition party leaping across a very modestly proportioned chasm. Another very movie serial element of the plot if that there are basically two stories here. The first four episodes are about the four regulars exploring Skaro, encountering and being captured by the Daleks and then escaping whilst quickly helping out some more photogenic locals. It could have ended right there at the end of episode four but then Ian reveals that the Daleks took the fluid link from him when he was captured and now they can't leave. Thus begins adventure two: an arduous journey through the wilderness of Skaro so they can enter the city from an unexpected angle, beat the baddies and go home. Well, try to get home.

The reason I link this to the Flash Gordon movie serial format is because those serials tended to reuse sets, either by using them for different places or by setting a couple of stories in the same place. Don't get me wrong: this works, especially at this stage where individual episode titles mean we're dealing with a continuous series rather than separate stories.

It works because a lot of effort is made to build the world of Skaro before our eyes. As previously noted this world-building is enhanced by the set design and the fantastic, dry ice shrouded model of the Dalek city but it all extends from the decision to start with an episode featuring only the four regulars with nary a Dalek, Thal or ostentatiously camp schoolboy to distract us from the exploration of Skaro. Other characters are introduced slowly: first a Dalek sucker menacing Barbara (there will never be a better Doctor Who scream), then the Daleks themselves followed by Susan meeting the Thal Alydon...

Actually, best to stop there a moment. More Thals turn up later but the scene between Susan and Alydon requires some short examination because it contains the very first racefail in Doctor Who. I'd completely forgotten the scene and expected to start talking about race in the series two essays from now in Marco Polo but there it is: a Jewish girl kneeling on the floor, staring fascinated at a towering Aryan man and calling him “perfect”. An Aryan whose people will later be involved in an act of genocide. This is especially problematic as one of the qualities that got Carole Ann Ford the job was her “Unearthly” elfin appearance.

Oh, there's far, far worse to come but monsters are born in this scene when we find out that the mechanical Daleks share their planet with pretty people and guess who ends the story annihilated and who gets to rebuild civilisation?

Not that even the Daleks are monsters yet. I mean, they clearly eat. This might seem like an insignificant detail but at this stage we're still looking even at the bad aliens as creatures who have civilisation and needs such as food and shelter. The whole plotline with the Thals is about them suffering a bad harvest and striking out in search of new food supplies. There's a sense of history to the two societies and not just in the scene where the Doctor is treated to a short history and astronomy lesson from Diony (Terry Nation Bingo Card: cross out Sole Female Guest Character). There's also the nature of the Thal's pacifism.

The story requires that the Thals end up fighting the Daleks so, obviously, they're going to come around but the story allows that pacifism might not be a mistake here. Ian and Barbara argue the point with Barbara pragmatically pointing out that if the Thals don't fight she and Ian can never leave Skaro whilst Ian is more sympathetic to their beliefs. It all comes down, in the end, to whether or not the Thals really believe in pacifism or if its a fear of conflict brought on by the consequences of the last war. This is a world where food is hard to grow because most of the planet has been devastated by neutron bombs so its not difficult to understand the perspective. Ian proves to Alydon there are things he'll fight for when Ian threatens to take Diony to the Dalek city as a prisoner, whereupon Alydon proves that even in pacifist societies they have action movies as he delivers a leading man uppercut to Ian's chin. It's that realisation that spurs Alydon to action and to recruit volunteers to aid him in storming the city (Terry Nation Bingo Card: cross out Prosaic Speech About Bravery).

I'm not going to argue that this story is entirely respectful to pacifism, it does largely reject the philosophy, but it at least phrases it as a debate and floats the idea that there are circumstances where pacifism is a reasonable response. There are worse ways to treat pacifism, we'll be dealing with some of them later in the '60s.

And then there are the Daleks, did I mention them? One of the things about Nation's 1960s scripts are that the Daleks are very much a work in progress and will vary greatly in each appearance. It won't be until The Daleks' Master Plan that Nation will settle on the default characterisation the Daleks become known for and even then the last few steps will be taken by David Whitaker in his season four scripts. That's the future, though, and we'll never see these Daleks again: Daleks who refer to themselves as “I” an awful lot, who grow vegetables for food and have large stores of toilet paper (bit weird, that one). The static electricity thing gets a token mention in their next story but pretty much disappears after this, mainly because it is very, very limiting.

The Daleks are almost people here, very alien and well on their way to being monsters but essentially still people. Doctor Who doesn't do monsters just yet. Even when monsters start to be a thing, when the series resurrects the Daleks for a rematch, they're very much a unique case for the rest of the Hartnell era. That's one of Nation's enduring legacies in the series: he created the first monsters and when he took his ball and swanned off to America the series began to generate more and more monsters in an attempt to capture the magic again.

Like most of Nation's legacies, it's a mixed one. 

Saturday Teatime #1: 100,000 BC

100,000 BC

3 episodes

written by Anthony Coburn

originally transmitted 30^th November - 14^th December 1963

In a way 100,000 BC is the first story in Doctor Who to be declared non-canon. The beginning of the series will be retold twice, first in David Whitaker's novelisation of The Daleks and again in the first Peter Cushing movie. These days with video, DVD, YouTube, Netflix. torrent sites and projects like this we take as gospel the televised version of events but back then you didn't have much of a chance. You either saw 100,000 BC when it first aired or you didn't have another chance until 1981 and The Five Faces Of Doctor Who repeats. The novelisation you could put on your shelf and read whenever you liked and once the movie made it to television it was a bank holiday staple for decades.

So 100,000 BC is surplus to requirements, yes? Well, yes and no. These three episodes represent three of five weeks in Doctor Who's history where no one knows what a Dalek looks like. Once you've got Daleks the appeal of cavemen arguing about fire pales somewhat, which is actually a pity. This is a very good story: pacey, well-directed, well-acted and with a strong underlying theme of fear woven throughout.

Actually, let's start with the theme of fear which motivates much of what we see in this story. Last time I made a comment about how An Unearthly Child felt surprisingly modern in some ways but these three episodes actually feel like the sort of story modern Doctor Who might tell if it did an old-fashioned “pure” historical. One of the big innovations of modern Who was to write a story around a theme: Vincent and the Doctor, for instance, is all about Vincent's emotional state, his depression and his joy so even his inevitable suicide isn't seen as a defeat. Here, forty-one years before Russell T. Davies holds his first tone meeting we see Verity Lambert, Waris Hussein and Anthony Coburn get the trick right with a production that is literally all about fear.

Old Mother fears fire because she fears change; Za fears the tribe will turn on him if he can't make fire; Hur is afraid her father will give her to Kal instead of Za; Ian fears the strange world he finds himself in; Susan fears for her grandfather's safety; the Doctor fears the mob of cavemen who capture him and demand he make fire; and Barbara, in one of Jacqueline Hill's best scenes as Barbara, breaks down in tears as the TARDIS crew flee from the Cave of Skulls. You might think I'd be a bit hard on that last scene, especially coupled with the similar fit of tears Susan goes through when the Doctor disappears but both women get strong, empowering scenes later on: Barbara explaining compassion to Hur and Susan leaping on the back of a caveman as she spearheads the attack to save the Doctor.

Like I said with An Unearthly Child and as I'm sure I'll say again over the next two seasons: there are far worse times to play a female companion than under Verity Lambert's producership. I'll have plenty of opportunities to lay tribute at those particular feet so let's talk instead about Waris Hussein's directing.

First off I have to say this: a lot of the praise I'm about to heap on Hussein is probably not just down to his being a good director (which he most definitely was) but also to the fact that Doctor Who is just starting. In the black and white years the series was produced almost continuously, to the point where cast members disappear for an episode or two at a time so they can have a holiday. The series is being made on a very fast production line and that has all sorts of consequences: actors get fatigued, sub-standard scripts make it to screen because there's simply no time to replace or rewrite them; and sometimes things just plain looked like a good idea on paper but turned out less impressive in practice. All these issues and more we'll grapple with throughout the Sixties and beyond but here, a couple of weeks into the series, these issues don't exist. Everyone is fresh and raring to do, the first scripts have considerable polish and everyone has had time to work out what they want to do with what they've got.

What Waris Hussein wants to do, incidentally, is most interesting with the cave people. Anthony Coburn puts in some good work here as well by giving them great turns of phrase: Kal doesn't understand the Doctor's pipe and matches and so believes the Doctor makes fire come from his fingers and has smoke in his mouth. Its Hussein's direction that makes them alien through hunched postures and animal movements, jerky motions as if they feel constantly under threat which ties in well with Hur not understanding compassion except in terms of a mother protecting her child, she doesn't even understand the word “friend”. Alethea Charleton as Hur, incidentally, is an absolute highlight of the story as she completely embraces the non-human movement style.

On the side of the TARDIS crew, as I say, the highlight of both directing and acting is Barbara's breakdown in the middle episode (or the third, if you're counting from An Unearthly Child, as is more normal). In later years the first trip in the TARDIS is an occasion for wonder and wide-eyed amazement but here it is terrifying and in pre-history it doesn't even have the allure Barbara will find in later historical adventures: the chance to meet people she's only read about.

This actually brings us to another way in which 100,000 BC is often forgotten: there's a slight (though far from universal) tendency to skip it when listing the pure historicals and start with Marco Polo. This isn't entirely unfair, we're not actually exploring history here. Over the next couple of seasons the historical stories will tend to feature one or both of a) a famous historical figure; or, b) a historical event, though not necessarily a famous one. In spite of the title we've come to known from our programme guides there's nothing to suggest even an approximate date for this story to take place in and, this being pre-history, there are no famous historical figures. Instead we see solidly fictional cave people in a solidly fictional drama about the discovery of fire. We're in pulp adventure territory with comic strip cavemen menacing our children's serial heroes. Seeing as I like the story an awful lot it seems churlish to complain but it gives the lie to the idea that Doctor Who dropped the educational aspects of its mandate on some kind of fixed curve: the first historical features no reference to any sort of authentic history, just a Boy's Own adventure setting that happens to be set in the past. There isn't even a real explanation of how to start a campfire, which given the ways in which later stories will fail to make magnetism, condensation and stuck switches interesting, is probably a blessing.

If any of these seem like criticisms (and, in my view, they are not) then the best way to consider it is this: the historical is obviously not done cooking. This is a fantastic adventure story but we aren't yet in the “pure historical” territory the Hartnell era will become associated with.

In a way this is reflective of the series in general. This is the story where the Doctor picks up a rock, subtly but obviously with the intention of braining a wounded Za so they can escape. All that stops him is Ian and he makes a feeble excuse about how he was going to ask Za to draw the route back to the TARDIS in the soil. There's a way to go before he becomes the Doctor, either as we understand the character or as Hartnell is generally remembered. There are hints though, like the scene where he tricks Kal into brandishing the bloodstained rock he used to kill Old Mother. It's a victory he wins through cleverness, dispatching an enemy through sheer bluff. This is the Doctor we want, even if his next move is to incite the other cave people to throw stones at Kal and drive him off. He is, honestly, a bit of a bully and a bit of a sulker at this point, glorying in being smarter than a bunch of starving primitives and leading them on to ostracise someone who threatens him.

He does not, in short, have a worthy adversary yet.

That's about to change.

Next Episode: The Daleks

Saturday Teatime #0: An Unearthly Child (pilot and transmitted versions)

I tried to do a Doctor Who marathon last year but circumstances got in the way and I had to abandon it after The Edge Of The Destruction. So let's try this again: An Unearthly Child to the 1996 TV Movie stopping at all stations.

Why am I doing this? Well, I'd bet my view of the modern series would be different if I'd watched the episodes in random order over the course of over half my life. I saw my first Doctor Who story (Planet of the Daleks, as it happens) in 1992 when I was nine and now between BBC DVDs and Loose Cannon reconstructions I finally can do a start-to-finish watchthrough.

As a project this is, of course, inspired and indebted to those who have gone before: Robert Shearman and Toby Hadoke's Running Through Corridors (which someday might even reach its second volume), Hannah J. Rothman's Twitter Who (which recently did), Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood's About Time and Philip Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum (recently concluded on his blog Philip Sandifer Writer). I heartily recommend all of them. Much as I love Sandifer's essays its Rothman's approach I intend to imitate. This here is one fan's journey through 697 episodes of Doctor Who, seeing how I experience it as a series rather than as isolated stories.

So let's start. Set co-ordinates: 5:16pm November 23^rd 1963...

AN UNEARTHLY CHILD

1 episode

written by Anthony Coburn and C.E. Webber (uncredited)

Originally transmitted 23^rd November 1963

Firstly, one more piece of housekeeping: I watched the untransmitted pilot version completely by mistake. I was going to skip it and start with the transmitted first episode but those jolly people at 2Entertain had other ideas and included the pilot on the Play All function.

(A quick note about what we mean by “pilot episode” here because it is sort of a fudge. This episode wasn't a proof of concept piece like, say, the hour-long version of Sherlock: A Study In Pink. This was filmed for transmission and remounted due to technical issues. If it had gone off without a hitch it would have been the one and only version of An Unearthly Child. As it is those issues arose and the opportunity was taken to tweak the script and direction for a second shoot. For reasons we'll most likely return to throughout the black-and-white series this was actually easier to do than just re-filming the scenes affected by technical issues.)

On the one hand this mistake enhances the project, while on another compromising it fatally. There are interesting observations to be made on how the second, transmitted version polished the first (and we'll get there) but it also means that my first stop on this project to experience Doctor Who as a linear, evolving text was an episode that doesn't contribute to that evolution. Still, this is where we are and I can no more pretend my reading of An Unearthly Child isn't informed by the pilot than I can pretend it isn't informed by the other twenty-plus years of my fandom.

One of the things seeing the pilot reveals is that from day one the idea of a hostile, untrustworthy Doctor was something the production team knew couldn't last. This is perhaps the greatest shift between the two versions of An Unearthly Child: the Doctor's reaction to Ian and Barbara intruding on his life changes dramatically.

In the pilot the Doctor is hostile from the off: confrontational with Ian and Barbara and outwardly cruel to Susan when we finally enter the TARDIS. He even calls her a “stupid child!”. Given the previous scenes lead us to suppose Susan is locked in a perfectly mundane police box it even seems likely he might hit her. In the final version Hartnell is more whimsical through these scenes. He's condescending, yes, but with an edge of charm and when he tells Ian “You don't understand and I knew that you wouldn't.” it hardly seems malicious, just weary and amused. Oddly, in the pilot, it's clear the Doctor kidnaps Ian and Barbara to prevent their knowledge of the TARDIS from contaminating history whilst the second version has him panic and take off so Susan won't leave him. Wait, hang on...

Pull back a second, I'm ignoring half the episode and focussing on the Doctor, which is more than An Unearthly Child ever does so rewind and start again. Re-set the co-ordinates for 5.16pm on Saturday 23^rd November 1963 and see the moment for what it really is:

What we have is 25 minutes of television based on slowly increasing weirdness in which the Doctor is one of the last elements introduced. The title, delivered within a bewilderingly psychedelic effects sequence and to the strains of gloriously weird music, has an implied question mark attached to it. The Doctor, rather the fact that Susan's grandfather is a doctor, gets a mention in Ian's first scene (the episode's third) but even when Hartnell appears his link to the mentioned grandfather is obscure for several minutes.

So absent the Doctor, lacking even that name when he appears, what do we have? The episode is named for Susan, Barbara is the first named character to get a line (the actual first line goes to a random schoolboy who says “Oooh, yes,” in a very camp manner over a girl's shoulder) and Ian seems to rank equal to her as a fellow investigator.

The first element to be introduced is an unexplained police telephone box (free for use of public, officers and cars respond to urgent calls) in the middle of a junkyard, a junkyard whose gates open of their own accord to let the camera in. It's that last detail that makes the junkyard into an uncanny space and lends the police box some mystique once the camera chooses it as a focus. The camera zooms in on the police box doors, blurs and resolves again into a school noticeboard. We go from the uncanny space of inexplicably mysterious police boxes to the mundane world of school sports, house news and camp schoolboys mocking girls in the corridors.

Susan Foreman intrudes on this world: a girl who knows too much about science and too little about the ordinary world. Her very ordinary teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, are suspicious and decide to follow her home. The story makes a point of contrasting Susan with her teachers: whilst Susan dances as if mesmerised by everyday music we get lines that establish Ian as the cool teacher who knows about pop singers and Barbara as the maternal sort who lends books and offers extra tutoring.

So the two ordinary characters follow the uncanny one home, leaving their space and entering hers: the junkyard at 76 Totters Lane. Reasons for Susan's behaviour, or parts of her behaviour, are offered by both teachers: Ian declares she's a genius, Barbara implies parental neglect for Susan's social oddities and they briefly wonder if it all might just be down to that most mundane explanation of teenage strangeness: a boy. Nevertheless, they follow her into the junkyard, into her space and gradually the ordinary world recedes. Strange objects scattered through the junkyard lead to the entrance of the mysterious grandfather and a confrontation that sees Barbara barge straight out of “our” world and into the most uncanny space yet: the TARDIS console room, bigger on the inside than the out.

From a modern perspective you'd be forgiven for assuming the series will continue as this episode sets out: with Susan as the focus. Its a very familiar set-up these days: we have a “special” person and two perceptive but outwardly ordinary people of either gender who fall into her orbit and thus into her adventures. It's a familiar set-up from any number of teen genre shows these days: Buffy The Vampire Slayer in particular. The not-unnatural assumption is that Ian and Barbara will discover Susan's “Unearthly” secret and perform the dual role of sidekicks and emotional support network in her adventures as Willow and Xander do in Buffy, or Chloe and Pete in the early seasons of Smallville.

So who is the mysterious grandfather in this formulation? Taking our two modern examples above he can either be a knowledgeable, guiding figure like Buffy's Rupert Giles or an antagonistic one like Smallville's Lex Luthor. Given the Doctor's behaviour in this episode either option is available.

It can't last, of course. We're years away from the makers of such series making the leap of realising that younger viewers will empathise more with younger leading protagonists so episode title or no episode title Susan is not destined to be our hero. Protagonist rights will settle on Ian as action man before finally resting on the Doctor's shoulders when he becomes the series' single enduring character. Susan's agency will be a sticking point in a lot of the next ten essays but I'm going to make a statement right now:

I don't believe Susan would have worked out better as a boy. The problem isn't that she's female given the praise anyone who does one of these projects reserves for Jacqueline Hill as Barbara. A female character doesn't need to be treated the way the series will treat Susan, especially on Verity Lambert's watch. The problem is that she is young, in particular that she's the Doctor's granddaughter. We'll revisit this theme I'm sure, as all criticism of Susan necessarily focusses on it, but the familial link makes her subordinate in an unavoidable way. With the three other regulars all being older than her and all possessed of a role that makes them socially responsible for her she doesn't have much chance of agency at this stage in the history of storytelling. This would be equally true for Samuel Foreman as it is for Susan Foreman.

With which thought we close out the episode on a desolate plain in an unknown time and place with a sinister shadow creeping across the ground towards that uncanny police box...

Next Episode: 100,000 BC