Doctor Who (6 page)

By this time, the audience knew the Doctor well enough that there was no longer the fear of anyone inferring inappropriate reasons for his having an unrelated teenage girl traveling and living with him, so Vicki's presence was accepted. On the surface, Vicki paralleled Susan, being another teenager intelligent beyond her years, having obtained certificates in medicine, chemistry, physics, and computer sciences by age ten. But her manner was much more Earth-bound and playful, the girl teasing the Doctor whenever he was in a cranky mood. If she believed someone wasn't listening to her, she pointed out the mistake. Vicki willingly chose life on the TARDIS, symbolizing the children watching who wished they could join the Doctor.

While O'Brien enjoyed her cast mates, she disliked her character occasionally being a damsel in distress. It also annoyed her that some directors focused on filming as quickly as possible rather than discussing the story more with the cast. In a commentary track for “The Space Museum,” William Russell offered an explanation. “I think that's one of the faults of being a regular in a series that brings in different directors. Because they
think the character—whatever you do—is probably already established, and they don't want to interfere.”

In an interview with
Doctor Who Magazine,
Jacqueline Hill remarked, “She inherited Carole's role of screaming all the time. . . . It was more or less her first big television part, and I think it was a bit of a rude awakening.”

Fortunately, Vicki still stood out as a feisty and intelligent girl. As the second year went on, new script editor Dennis Spooner continued pushing the program's boundaries. Spooner told
Doctor Who Magazine
:

 

After the first series, we realized that the show was destined to run a long time. And in a television show, you have to learn very quickly what you are going to get away with because once it becomes at all established you cannot change it. . . . With the second series of
Doctor Who,
we knew that whatever we could establish would make the boundaries for a long time to come. “The Romans” was done for comedy, and in “The Web Planet” we wanted to see how far we could go with being weird. And my God, that tested facilities and technical resources to the limit.

The Voyage Home

“The Chase,” the penultimate story of the program's second year, became famous for a few reasons. Along with the Doctor learning the Daleks now had time travel, the first episode of the story had the TARDIS use a “time-space visualizer” to peek in on a performance by the Beatles. Due to legal rights, this small segment has sadly been removed from the DVD release.

Another thing that marked this story was that it ended with the departure of Barbara and Ian. The schoolteachers make it back to London by stealing a Dalek time ship, arriving roughly two years after they first found the TARDIS. Unlike Susan's departure, theirs is a happy one, the two shouting, “It was fun, Doctor!” before running through the streets together. Back on the TARDIS, the Doctor, solemn and stiff, quietly says, “I shall miss them. Yes, I shall miss them. Silly old fusspots.” It's a rare display of
emotion from the First Doctor, one of our first clues to how much he fears loneliness and the departure of friends.

Interestingly, it has been said by several who worked with him that William Hartnell became afraid of Daleks after finishing “The Chase,” concluding that their presence meant someone in the cast was leaving. The next Dalek adventure followed suit.

“Jacqueline Hill and I left together, and Billy was absolutely furious,” William Russell told
Doctor Who Magazine.
In another interview with
Doctor Who Magazine,
Hill added:

 

We'd done two years of it, which was a strain . . . Everything that we wanted to do in the series had been accomplished, and we felt, and I think Verity sneakingly agreed with us, that it was time for the series to try and see if it could do something new. As for the question of going together, well, it all just seemed to come together at the right time for both of us. I think it had always been felt that Ian and Barbara, who had this slightly romantic side to their relationship, should go together much as they came—back to the London they left. They wrote us out well.

 

Russell often spoke fondly of his time on
Doctor Who
and continued acting on a regular basis, with roles in TV shows such as
Breaking Point, Harriet's Back in Town, Black Adder,
and
Coronation Street,
as well as a minor role as an elder of Krypton in
Superman: The Movie.
Hill left acting to raise a family, but returned to television roughly a decade later. She came back to
Doctor Who
in the Fourth Doctor adventure “Meglos,” playing the character Lexa.

Unlike today, there wasn't much media attention surrounding the show's cast changes. As Russell told
Doctor Who Magazine,
“We all got up early, drove into London and rehearsed, and then went home; life went on.” A Fifth Doctor TV story called “Mawdryn Undead” intended for Russell to return as Ian, but the plan didn't work out and the character's role was replaced.

Though tie-in media sometimes revisited Ian and Barbara, saying they married, the characters were never mentioned again in
Doctor Who
(although Barbara's photograph appeared in a scene cut from the 2010 adventure “The Vampires of Venice”). Just over forty-five years after last seeing them with the Doctor, fans finally got an answer during
The Sarah Jane Adventures
in 2010. In the two-part “Death of the Doctor,” Sarah Jane Smith reveals that she has learned about two married professors in Cambridge, named Ian and Barbara Chesterton, neither of whom appears to have aged since the 1960s.

New Crew, New Doctor

“He's the crew. We're just the passengers.”

—Vicki, from “The Time Meddler” (1965)

 

“The Chase” also introduced Steven Taylor, a combat pilot from Earth's future (some time after the Dalek invasion of the twenty-second century). Before meeting the Doctor, Steven has spent two years as a prisoner on the planet Mechanus, with only a toy panda called HiFi for company. During the story's last episode, he wanders into the TARDIS, seeking safety before he collapses from weakness, unintentionally becoming a stowaway as the ship takes flight.

Peter Purves (Steven Taylor)

Peter Purves, a young actor who had appeared in
Armchair Theater
and BBC's
Play of the Month,
played Steven Taylor. He originally appeared as Morton Dill, a minor character, in an early episode of “The Chase” and impressed the director enough that he was asked to be the new companion. Purves was first in a long line of actors who appear in
Doctor Who
and then return as a different character.

With Steven's addition to the TARDIS crew, the next story, “The Time Meddler,” served both as season finale and the first chapter of a new era. Originally, the Doctor had traveled with three people who all longed for home.
Now, he had two companions happy to embark on unpredictable adventures. As Vicki and Steven both recognized the Doctor's leadership rather than challenge it, they seemed to inspire the character to fill that role better, truly making him the hero fans know today rather than an occasional obstacle in the lives of his crew.

In 2013, Peter Purves made his first appearance at Gallifrey One, a fan-run convention held annually in Los Angeles since 1990, and spoke glowingly of his time on
Doctor Who.
“There was actually a while where I didn't want to do more conventions because I thought,
I don't like looking back.
But doing these DVD commentaries on the old shows and seeing them again, there's a lot I fondly remember and things I like much better now. ‘The Gunfighters,' where the Doctor gets mistaken for Doc Holliday? I used to think it was quite bad . . . but now it's great fun to me. Bill was just enjoying himself. He loved the idea of a Western for the kids. He really wanted the show to be enjoyable for children. It bothered him if it got a little too dark or violent.”

I pointed out to Purves what a unique crew he and Maureen O'Brien made. Rather than two ordinary people from the modern day, here were a soldier and a genius from the future. “Yeah, it became a different show in a way,” Purves replied. “Now you couldn't ignore it was science fiction even if you just had a historical fiction story. . . . Vicki and Steven were from the future, and they could recognize ray guns and spaceships all by themselves.

“It was a great time, and Bill was marvelous,” he added. “Looking back, I can still be critical of my performance. We were shooting so many episodes, and we had I think about ten weeks off in the year, so there was a rush. You didn't always have time to consider things you wanted clear about your character. But now I'm back doing Steven [in audio dramas] for Big Finish. . . . In The Anachronauts [audio drama], there's a bit there about Steven's guilt that he left a war to go have fun time traveling. He didn't mean to, but he did.”

Lambert Leaves

Soon after Peter Purves joined the cast, Verity Lambert left
Doctor Who,
though she remained at the BBC. She later explained,

 

I had been at
Doctor Who
for . . . probably more than eighteen months . . . and I just felt that, you know, it needed new blood. I think things do . . . especially something like
Doctor Who.
I mean, I'd had tremendous fun, and we'd been able to do so many different things, and I just needed to move on, really. And there was another idea that Sydney had called
Adam Adamant
which was equally kind of, sort of mad, and I was quite attracted to that.

 

The last episode that Verity Lambert produced was “Mission to the Unknown.” It's the only story of the classic series that was one episode in length and is the only episode of both the classic series and the modern that doesn't feature or mention the Doctor or even any of his companions. The episode was a prelude to the adventure “The Daleks' Master Plan,” though the four-part story “The Myth Makers” aired in between.

Lambert always spoke with pride about her time with
Doctor Who.
When people mentioned how often tight budgets or problems on set created obstacles, she offered that people learn more during times when things go wrong. She was happy with having worked on a show with such an atypical hero and a universal appeal to children and adults, though she did criticize some later eras during which she felt the program strayed too far from what she considered to be the core story. She died in 2007.

The Comic Doctor

At twenty-six years old, the classic
Doctor Who
program remains the longest running science fiction series in television history. Less known is that the
Doctor Who
comic strip, though it has changed publishers, is the longest running comic strip based on a TV series, starting in November 1964 in the pages of
TV Comic
and continuing to this day in
Doctor Who Magazine.

TV Comic
catered to a readership generally under the age of ten, so making stories that appealed to parents as well wasn't a concern. The narratives, drawn by Neville Main, were simplistic fare, much lighter than the TV show. There was still violence and death, true, but it didn't feel as dark as the show would become.

The first story, “The Klepton Parasites,” features two preadolescent children named John and Gillian who decide to meet their mysterious grandfather, a man who calls himself “Dr. Who.” They find a yard rather than a house, empty except for a police box that's bigger on the inside. The Doctor, drawn to resemble William Hartnell, looks up as the children enter his ship and says, “You must be John and Gillian! How nice to meet you!”

This Doctor wasn't sinister at all, in keeping with how the character had softened by the time the comic appeared. He was a curious, mischievous, occasionally reckless inventor with a bottomless black bag that held all manner of strange gadgets, rather like a science fiction Mary Poppins. The comic never addressed whether he was an alien or a scientist native to England. When their first adventure ended, Dr. Who suggested taking his grandchildren home, but John said he would be happy to continue traveling through space and time.

There was little concern for continuity between the strip and the TV program, although an early strip clearly provided a sequel to the TV story “The Web Planet.” The comic had its own sense of fun, depicting aliens and stories not easily brought to life on television and even dabbling in experimental storytelling, including one adventure shown in reverse to indicate time running backward.
TV Comic
published the strip until 1971,
at which point it moved to the pages of
TV Action
and featured the Third Doctor. This new and dynamic incarnation of the comic appealed to a broader fan base.

The strip moved back to
TV Comic
in 1973 and remained there until 1979. This second
TV Comic
era didn't match the quality of the
TV Action
era. In fact, some of the Fourth Doctor stories were just Third Doctor strips with Tom Baker's face drawn over Jon Pertwee's. In these republished stories, television companion Sarah Jane Smith was altered to become a new character named Joan Brown.

In 1979, the strip moved to
Doctor Who Weekly,
a new magazine dedicated to articles, reviews, commentaries, and interviews surrounding the show, published by the UK branch of Marvel Comics. The comic quickly shifted gears, hewing much closer to what appeared on screens. The hero became simply “the Doctor” rather than “Doctor Who” and was clearly identified as a renegade Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. The first regular artist was Dave Gibbons, who gained greater acclaim later as co-creator of the comic book series
Watchmen.

Doctor Who Weekly
evolved into
Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly,
then
The Official Doctor Who Magazine,
and later
Doctor Who Magazine.
To this day, it is the longest running magazine based on a television series and happily shows no signs of stopping.