Teatime Extra: Historical Reconstruction (The Missing Episodes)

This is a pertinent one because I want to do a complete watch-through and obviously there's a big stumbling block of those 97 episodes the BBC taped over, incinerated or just plain lost. This is an improvement, of course, and the number was a lot higher when I first became a fan. Its a disappointment every new fan experiences to find that you physically can't appreciate the whole of the series you've fallen in love with.

We're in a better position than most, though. The missing episodes of say, The Avengers, are simply gone. The missing episodes of Doctor Who all have surviving audio recordings made by fans and so we have ways and means available to us.

There are the official BBC releases, for one thing. Every missing episode has been released as a narrated audio and selected episodes have been animated as part of DVDs where the majority of the story survives. I applaud the dedication this shows but I will not be using these official releases in my watch-through.

The reason is that when the newly recovered episode of Galaxy 4 was released as part of The Aztecs Special Edition with an abridged reconstruction of the rest of the story, I can to a realisation: I didn't remember a single moment of the story! Nothing, it was as if it was all new to me. I don't know why but the audios left little impression on me.

As to the animated episodes, they are good even if The Reign Of Terror is edited a bit too fast to fit the style of the surviving episodes. I didn't mind when I watched them but the point of this watch-through is to experience Doctor Who in as close a fashion to the original transmission order as possible.

Enter Loose Cannon Productions. Loose Cannon were a fan group who took the audio recordings and married them to whatever images survive: Australian censor clips, publicity photographs and, of course, telesnaps. Telesnaps are a very odd artefacts: essentially what happened was a man called John Cura was employed by producers and directors to sit in front of his television and take photographs every couple of seconds. These were used for future reference since the recordings weren't likely to be available. Now they form an invaluable visual reference for most of the missing episodes. They don't exist for all episodes but Loose Cannon have done excellent work with whatever they can find.

These videos are, frankly, the closest thing we'll get to actually watching these episodes in many cases and that's why I'm using them.

(The Loose Cannon website www.recons.com seems to be inactive, their having finished their project many years ago but the recons are almost all available on Youtube and through *cough* the other usual means.)

Saturday Teatime 1.4: 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.)

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's news pages regularly carry 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 were remembering 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 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 (the TARDIS console room) 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 even if not just yet.

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 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: Barbara 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.

Dear BBC,

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 about the series. 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 with lethal results. 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 and peril” 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.

Doctor Who: he's one groovy dude.

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.

I don't go in for shipping, but if I did...

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 starts to accuse 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 ends with 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 schoolboy 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.

Next Episode: Marco Polo

Saturday Teatime 1.3: The Daleks

Once you read a few of these projects you start to see some patterns emerging. For instance, 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 the fact he held the copyright on the Daleks and had first refusal on writing the script whenever 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 the 1950s Flash Gordon movie serial form. 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 small 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. On this note its probably time to note that my theme of “early Doctor Who was more modern than I thought” pretty much curls up and dies here 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 when some talky stuff happens 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 mo. 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 racism 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 declaring 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 or, to put it another way, her non-standard beauty.

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 quite a bit between stories. 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 Season Four. 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 from there, 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 1.2: 100,000 BC

(Yes, I'm doing these on days other than Saturday because I worked out I didn't have a three year project in me. At two a week it's a year and a half and that seems a decent length of time to me.)

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: pacy, 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 is to write a story around a theme: Vincent And The Doctor 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 new 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 makes 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, not to mention her "flaming skulls" plan which is both awesome and gruesome.

I just love how into it Carole Ann Ford looks

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 be 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 to less so 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.

Alethea Charlton as the cat's mother

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 so says he 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 Charlton 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 (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 and condensation 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 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/knife 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 cleverer 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 but that's about to change.

Next Episode: The Daleks

Saturday Teatime 1.1: An Unearthly Child

Well, one of the first things to note here is that 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 the “pilot episode” here. This name was given retrospectively and isn't how the episode was intended. It 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 and on another compromises 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 actually 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 is markedly different.

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. 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 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 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. It isn't an unfamiliar 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 Sullivan and Pete Ross 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 decades away from the makers of such series making the leap of realising that younger viewers will empathise more with a 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 single enduring character the series has to offer. 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 Foreman 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 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

Time, Space and Saturday Teatime prologue

This is a project I've been meaning to get around to for years: a full watch-through of classic Doctor Who from 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 new series would be different if I'd watched it 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 watched the recently rediscovered The Enemy Of The World three weeks ago. Aside from that one unreleased episode of The Underwater Menace it took me 21 years to experience the complete canon in no real order and at the whim of the BBC's video and DVD schedule.

So now I have the chance: the very-nearly-almost complete canon of surviving episodes on shiny disc and a full set of Loose Cannon missing episode reconstructions. As I say, I've seen it all before but never in order, the way a series is supposed to be experienced.

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 (currently hosted at 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.

And tomorrow we begin, at that mysterious junkyard at 76 Totter's Lane...

Next Episode: An Unearthly Child