Timeless Adventures

by Brian J. Robb

  The ‘magic-door’ concept for the Doctor’s time-space machine was a stroke of genius, one of the crucial elements that gives the show appeal, longevity and variety. This was CS Lewis’s wardrobe – a doorway to a magical world – combined with HG Wells’ time machine. Add in Newman’s additional space-travel capability and Newman and Webber’s characters, especially the mysterious, fugitive Doctor and his human companions, and the basic concept of Doctor Who had finally been devised: a true group effort of popular creation.

  There was much more detail to be added to the rather vague ‘magic-door’ concept, but each revision of the format document through the summer of 1963 brought the show that would debut in November closer into being. Webber suggested that the Doctor’s ship should be unreliable and faulty, and that the Doctor would have trouble finding fuel and spare parts on his travels through space and time, a notion that Newman heartily approved of. Webber also suggested that, due to his memory loss, the Doctor didn’t really know how to operate the machine properly. This lack of control would make the group’s adventures unpredictable: just like the viewer, they wouldn’t know where, in which time or on what planet they would land next.

  Like the naming of the character as ‘Doctor Who’, the question of who devised the outward appearance of the time-space machine is lost in the mists of time itself. The notion is usually credited to Anthony Coburn, yet another BBC staff writer whom Donald Wilson had charged with developing ideas for the series. While on a stroll near his office, contemplating the nature of the Doctor’s ‘magic door’ into his ship, Coburn supposedly passed a police box and suggested it to Webber as a replacement for his ‘night watchman’s shelter’ idea. Police boxes were a familiar sight on the streets of 1960s Britain. Often located on street corners, they provided shelter for patrolling policemen and offered a telephone link back to police headquarters in the decades before widespread use of walkie-talkies or mobile phones. It was an inspired thought, as it served to ground the mysterious Doctor’s ‘impossible’ vehicle in an everyday world that families could recognise from their own contemporary surroundings. It was also a curiously whimsical notion that would be one factor in Doctor Who’s unique sense of Britishness. The next draft of the format document, from mid-May 1963, described the time-space machine as having ‘the appearance of a police box standing in the street’.

  It’s possible that those within the BBC concerned with the development of Doctor Who had at the backs of their minds (perhaps after an early-1960s TV transmission) the little-remembered Gainsborough comedy Time Flies from 1944. Writers Phil Norman and Chris Diamond suggested in TV Cream’s Anatomy of Cinema that actor Felix Aylmer might count as the first incarnation of the Doctor, as in Time Flies he plays an old scientist who’s invented a time-space machine that takes the form of a large silver sphere that seems to be bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside. The movie sees comedian Tommy Handley joining Aylmer, Evelyn Dall as showgirl Susie and George Moon as her husband Bill in a trip back in time to the Elizabethan era, where the gimmick of giving Shakespeare (John Salew) the ideas for his plays appears (as replayed in the Doctor Who adventure The Shakespeare Code in 2007). Aylmer’s Professor even bears a more than passing resemblance to William Hartnell’s TV and Peter Cushing’s 1960s movie version of the Doctor in dress and mannerisms. There are other curiosities: the ship is launched by accident, the crew (a ‘scientist’ and his three companions) are rendered unconscious upon take-off and mention is made of possibly meeting primitive man at their new location – all strongly echoed in Doctor Who’s eventual first episode. The adventurers encounter Queen Elizabeth and Raleigh (the Queen appears in Doctor Who in a Hartnell-starring episode of The Chase entitled ‘The Executioners’ as well as in The Shakespeare Code), as well as Shakespeare (also in ‘The Executioners’ and, of course, The Shakespeare Code). The scientist’s side-kicks are described as his ‘companions’, while Handley’s antics could be compared to those of the Meddling Monk, a mischievous character met by Hartnell’s Doctor in The Time Meddler. The film even climaxes with a hunt for a missing element (platinum) needed to make the ship work and effect their escape, a plot point repeated in Hartnell’s second serial, The Daleks, with mercury instead of platinum. The coincidences are certainly curious, to say the least.

  The fact that the Doctor’s human companions were to be two schoolteachers and a pupil was no accident. As well as being an exciting adventure serial, Newman wanted the new show to be broadly educational (living up to the promise of the BBC Charter to ‘inform, educate and entertain’), to use the Doctor’s travels through time and space to bring the facts of history and cosmology to an attentive audience, disguised as entertainment. For the young, radical, commercially driven newcomer to the Corporation, this was a very traditional, almost Reithian concept but he also saw it as a function of good, literary science fiction. In further revisions to the series’ format document, teenager Biddy became Sue and was working class (seen as a ‘good thing’ in 1960s drama), while Cliff was a science teacher and Lola a history teacher, encompassing the two disciplines that might be useful in uncontrolled travels through time and space. Storylines were by now being devised for the character’s adventures. An initial outline in which the travellers were to be reduced to miniature size and trapped in Cliff’s school lab was rejected by Newman as ‘thin on incident and character’. Writer Anthony Coburn was set to work by acting producer Rex Tucker on a second adventure that would take the central characters back to prehistoric times where they would meet a clan of cavemen, as alluded to in Time Flies.

  In June 1963, Doctor Who’s first permanent producer arrived at BBC Television Centre to take up her post. Verity Lambert, then just 28 years old, had been selected by Sydney Newman for the still-vacant producer post. Newman’s initial choice for the job had been Don Taylor, a BBC staff director associated with provocative single plays and the work of radical writer David Mercer. Taylor had been upset by the arrival of Newman at the BBC, believing Newman’s commercial, populist approach to drama conflicted with his own conception of the BBC as the National Theatre of the airways. When Taylor passed on the new Saturday teatime series, Newman had suggested to Shaun Sutton, then best known for his children’s drama serials (which Newman thought old-fashioned), that he take on Doctor Who. Sutton, too, passed. Newman then recalled Lambert, a production assistant who’d impressed him at Armchair Theatre on ABC.

  ‘When Donald Wilson and I discussed who might take over the responsibility for producing the show I rejected the traditional drama types who did children’s serials,’ said Newman of his approach, ‘and said that I wanted somebody who’d be prepared to break rules in doing the show. Somebody young with a sense of “today” – the early “Swinging London” days.’

  Newman was essentially looking for someone in his own image, rather than someone trained in the ‘old-fashioned’ ways of the BBC. Although Lambert’s experience was limited, Newman felt that enthusiasm and independence were more important to the task of running Doctor Who than familiarity with the inner workings of the BBC. ‘She had never directed, produced, acted or written drama but, by God, she was a bright, highly intelligent, outspoken production secretary who took no nonsense and never gave any,’ Newman stated. ‘I introduced her to Donald Wilson and I don’t think he quite liked her at first. She was too good looking, too smart alecky and too commercial-television minded. I knew they would hit it off when they got to know one another better. They did.’

  Lambert had split her time at ABC with a year working on television in New York, an experience that had broadened her horizons and her experience. She arrived at the BBC to find there was little to the Doctor Who project other than the ever-evolving format document and a host of growing technical objections from the BBC facilities managers at the tiny and antiquated studios at Lime Grove. Lambert found she had to work closely with the series’ associate producer Mervyn Pinfield, who’d been appointed to handle the technical side of what was proving to be an ambit
ious project. Lambert also met with director Waris Hussein, a young newcomer to the BBC like herself, who’d been attached to direct the planned second serial about the show’s characters meeting ancient cavemen.

  Most of the technical objections centred on the first storyline, which involved the main characters being shrunk to minuscule size, something those at Lime Grove believed was beyond the capability of the technical facilities available. Finally, the decision was taken to shelve the ‘Giants’ storyline and pull the caveman tale forward to form the first story of the series. Lambert and the team agreed that it would be sensible to postpone production by a few weeks to give them all time to get to grips with the complicated, technically challenging show. The core Doctor Who production team was completed with the arrival of script editor David Whitaker at the end of June 1963.

  Scripts became the first priority, as without those basic blueprints no television drama could ever enter production. Anthony Coburn delivered his draft caveman adventure scripts, which contained some important changes. The male schoolteacher was now called Ian Chesterton, while the teen female character had become Susan Foreman. With two of the scripts for the first four-episode story delivered, scenic-design work could begin in earnest, a step especially necessary as the first episode introduced the Doctor’s time-space machine, something that promised to be a major design challenge for BBC technicians more used to contemporary or period dramas.

  Lambert and Whitaker were not entirely happy with Coburn’s work on the opening adventure and, following the delivery of his third of four episodes, they requested that he embark on a major re-write. In the meantime, Lambert turned her attention to casting the ongoing central roles for the series. Her first task was to find the right actor to take on the leading role of the mysterious Doctor. Lambert may have been new to creative responsibility but she knew enough to be aware that the success or failure of a TV show often revolved around the leading actors. She had to find the right man to inhabit the role of the Doctor.

  In conjunction with Waris Hussein, now set to direct the first story of the new series, based on Coburn’s caveman scripts, Lambert drew up a shortlist of suitable stars. On the list were renowned thespian Cyril Cusack and Leslie French (who had apparently been the nude model for the statue of Ariel on the facade of the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London and later appeared in a 1988 Doctor Who story, Silver Nemesis). Eventually, Lambert auditioned 55-year-old William Hartnell, based on a viewing of the Lindsay Anderson film This Sporting Life (1963), although he was best known to TV viewers for his role as the irascible military man in Granada’s comedy series The Army Game (1957–61). Hartnell had often been typecast as tough guys or criminals, but This Sporting Life had allowed him to show a broader range, something he was intent on developing further. While his agent was reluctant to connect Hartnell with what was being perceived as a children’s show, the actor himself was keen to break out of the typecasting that had been afflicting him and readily attended a meeting with Lambert and Hussein. Enthused by the project, he agreed to take on the lead role of the Doctor.

  That major hurdle overcome, Lambert and Hussein quickly cast the remaining central roles. Science teacher Ian Chesterton was to be played by Russell Enoch, who performed under the stage name William Russell, and was well known to ITV viewers as the lead in The Adventures of William Tell. Jacqueline Hill became history teacher Barbara Wright following a meeting at a party attended by Lambert and her old friend, the director Alvin Rakoff, Hill’s husband. The role of Susan, now the granddaughter of the mysterious Doctor, was a little harder to fill. Several actresses were auditioned (including Jackie Lane, later to play companion Dodo), but none were deemed suitable. According to longstanding legend, Hussein spotted a likely looking girl on a studio monitor at Television Centre, and soon 23-year-old Carole Ann Ford was signed as Susan Foreman.

  With the cast in place, Coburn’s revised scripts arrived in July 1963 and were much more to Lambert and Whitaker’s liking, with characters having been strengthened, the cavemen given proper dialogue (the first drafts contained only grunts) and the backgrounds for the Doctor and Susan deftly sketched out in only a few lines of dialogue.

  The first scripts for the show displayed the series’ scientific and educational remit clearly. The two teachers would be the means by which the series could impart information or lessons in science and history and, while she now had an otherworldly background as the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan was clearly an audience-identification figure for younger viewers. She’s even into then-contemporary early-1960s rock ‘n’ roll (fictional group John Smith and the Common Men, rapidly rising up the pop charts, play on her ‘transistor’ radio). These three characters would provide templates for the majority of the Doctor’s travelling companions across the next 45 years, with their roles and functions within the drama evolving to reflect the times in which the programmes were made (spanning five different decades), but always staying the same at the most basic ‘character function’ level.

  The new cast, along with the series’ production crew, found themselves facing a series of technical challenges in getting the show made. The concerns initially raised by service departments (scenery, costume, make-up, lighting) about the limitations of shooting the new series at the antiquated Lime Grove studios continued to grow as preparations were made to record the first episode of Doctor Who. Those who ran the BBC technical departments that would have to provide set designs, build scenery, create costumes and produce special effects felt the proposed show was simply too ambitious given the budget of just over £2,000 per 25-minute episode. Sydney Newman probably saw their objections as symptomatic of the hidebound nature of the BBC, where embedded interests often didn’t like to be challenged. Despite that, it was true that Studio D at Lime Grove, an old film studio bought by the BBC prior to the creation of Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush, was unlikely to make the production of Doctor Who easy. The huge technical challenges of mounting the series would be one of the next obstacles to face neophyte producer Verity Lambert.

  Along with the technical problems came increasing doubts among the senior managers at the BBC about the wisdom of scheduling this seemingly unconventional new show to run for 52 weeks of the year (as was the plan at this early pre-transmission stage). With episodes recorded only three to four weeks prior to transmission, the launch date of the show had already been postponed several times, from July 1963 to an eventual November debut, by which time the perepisode budget had risen to nearer £4,000, due to the one-off costs of building the interior of the Doctor’s time-space ship. BBC internal memos from the period reveal that Assistant Controller of Television Joanna Spicer had objected to the new series’ apparent failure to go through the usual BBC approvals processes, while even Donald Baverstock was finding it difficult to justify the cost of the show in his overall annual planning. He instructed Donald Wilson and Lambert not to develop any material beyond four initial episodes, while a proposed Radio Times front cover promoting the first episode was abandoned, according to Newman due to ‘lack of confidence in the programme at Controller level’.

  In the middle of all this seeming chaos, Lambert was struggling to develop future scripts and ensure that the resources were available to support the show, as well as making sure that any technical challenges were overcome and that the cast were comfortable with their roles. It was a tall order and would have tested the most experienced television producer. Even in 1963, however, television was a young medium, one in which imaginative and motivated people could make a big splash. Something that allowed Lambert to chart her own course with Doctor Who was the fact that the BBC had never made anything like it before, so there was no ‘right’ way to do a weekly science-fiction-fantasy series in the UK.

  It was 27 September 1963 before Doctor Who’s first episode went before the cameras (and it had to be re-shot on 18 October after Sydney Newman decided it was not technically polished enough for broadcast). By this time, Lambert had three additional storylines
at various stages of preparation. The Tribe of Gum was Anthony Coburn’s caveman adventure (with the first episode featuring much of CE Webber’s series-setting material from his abandoned ‘Giants’ storyline), and this was to be followed by the same writer’s The Robots, about a future world dominated by robotic life forms. Beyond this, John Lucarotti had been commissioned to write A Journey to Cathay, a historical adventure featuring Marco Polo, and former Tony Hancock comedy scriptwriter Terry Nation was working on The Survivors, about a race mutated due to a radiation war. Other writers had also been contacted and the TV industry was sufficiently aware of the upcoming series that agents and writers had started to submit unsolicited storylines and sample scripts. By the end of October, the BBC hierarchy had only officially committed to 13 episodes of Doctor Who, consisting of an opening episode establishing the premise and the characters; three episodes of the caveman adventure; a seven-part serial; and a (possibly concluding) self-contained two-part serial. The future of the show beyond that point would be decided in the New Year based upon its success, or failure, to attract an audience for the early-Saturdayevening transmission slot between November 1963 and February 1964.

  The recording of what is now regarded as the ‘pilot’ episode of Doctor Who was a fraught affair, with fluffed lines, problems with the complicated TARDIS set (the Doctor’s time-space ship), wobbly camerawork and badly played-in music. When Newman viewed the episode the following week, he made a number of comments, covering everything from technical issues to characterisation. He didn’t think the character of the Doctor was ‘funny’ enough, while he felt that Susan was ‘too dour’. He also felt that the two teachers didn’t react strongly enough to the situation of their pupil being seemingly locked up in a box. In technical terms alone, Newman deemed the episode not suitable for transmission. Revealing his personal commitment to the show, he gave Lambert and Hussein permission to remount the recording of the first episode, revising it accordingly. Lessons having been learnt, both felt that, second time around, they could improve on the first effort. In the second version, some of the original dialogue, which pinned down the Doctor and Susan’s origins to ‘the forty-ninth century’, was rewritten to become the vaguer ‘We are wanderers in the fourth dimensions of space and time, cut off from our own planet…’ This simple act allowed for decades of fan speculation and production-team reinvention of the Doctor’s mysterious origins. Hartnell’s Doctor was also made less abrasive in the second version of the episode, following Newman’s guidance that the serial’s leading character had to be more sympathetic (or, at least, slightly less alien).