The Doctors Who's Who (36 page)

If a point is given for every story each actor has been in and half a point for each guest role he has made (‘The Three Doctors’/’The Two Doctors’), the most popular doctors by importance of story content are:

1.  Tom Baker (9)
   
2.  David Tennant (8)
   
3.  William Hartnell (7½)
   
4.  Jon Pertwee (7 ½)
   
5.  Patrick Troughton (7)
   
6.  Matt Smith (4)
   
7.  Peter Davison (3)
   
8.  Christopher Eccleston (2)
   
9.  Colin Baker (1)
   
10.  Sylvester McCoy (1)
    
11.  Paul McGann (1)
    

Perhaps this is an unfair way of marking popularity, especially when you consider that Paul McGann was only in one story and Christopher Eccleston only ever made one season, while
Tom Baker played the role for seven years. Despite this, the list does make sense, with the youngest Doctors mid-table and the two Doctors with the poorest budgets and scripts near the bottom. If
Doctor Who
is judged on its innovation, moral stance and good stories, as well as characters and monsters, then the best Doctors, for all-round thrills, are those highlighted in the top five of this specifically calculated list.

ANALYSIS

It is 5.15 on Saturday, 23 November 1963. The world is reeling from the news headlines: President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas the previous day and a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, accused of his murder. Closer to home news came in that Matt Busby’s Manchester United had lost by a single goal to nil against Bill Shankly’s Liverpool in a tough top-of-the-table football match. Later on, Liverpool’s very own teenage heart-throbs, The Beatles, would play their 19th gig on their autumn UK tour in Newcastle, to the delight of their evergrowing fan-base.

It was a cold and wet evening, so not everyone chose to be out. Many families sat around the TV in anticipation of a brand-new children’s TV series. It had made big news in the current edition of
The Radio Times
and was to star film actor William Hartnell, famed for his tough-guy roles in
Brighton Rock
and
Hell’s Drivers
, but this time playing a completely different character: a mysterious grandfather-figure called The Doctor. The show was called
Doctor Who
and nobody either watching it or connected with it would dream that it would thrill audiences for at least the next 50 years. How could they? It was planned to run for only 52 weeks.

As soon as Ron Grainer’s haunting theme tune started and the time vortex swirled for the very first time, television history was
made. The title
Doctor Who
appeared and faded and the familiar figure of a policeman appeared from thick fog. A church bell chimed 3am and the gates to 76 Totters Yard, a rundown London scrap yard, creaked open, inviting you, the audience, into a bizarre new universe of possibilities. The music continued and the camera panned to a familiar sight, a Police Public Call Box, which – rather unsettlingly – hummed steadily, as if it was somehow
alive
, but of course it couldn’t be… The camera lingered on the police box for a moment, the audience intrigued but unsuspecting; how could they guess that this so-familiar sight (as it was then) was a space/time capsule? But within 25 minutes, before The Beatles hit the stage in Newcastle and conversations about Communist threats on the Western world continued in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, people would know of a strange being called the Doctor, his equally intriguing ‘granddaughter’ Susan, and the police-box spacecraft known as the TARDIS.

The very first episode of
Doctor Who
‘An Unearthly Child’ is an amazing piece of television. It works as a one-off story of alien abduction, but not from a malicious point of view, like
The X Files
. The Doctor and Susan travelled in time and space and chose London, 1963, as a place to hide and to try and lead a peaceful life, but Susan’s genius in certain school lessons – and ignorance of 1960s culture – makes her teachers curious as to her home life. They decide to follow her home, to the junkyard from the beginning of the episode, and there they lose her, only to be confronted by the Doctor, a crotchety old man who appears to know more about Susan than he lets on. But Susan appears in the police box doorway and the schoolteachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, become anxious. They push their way into the small cabinet and find themselves in a gleaming spaceship that is bigger on the inside than the outside. It is here that they learn that
the Doctor and Susan are exiles from their own planet. Did they escape? It appears so. Are they criminals? It is uncertain. They appear worried that they could be exposed to the authorities, but it is an accident, a tussle between the Doctor and the programme’s first hero, Ian Chesterton, that catapults them into adventures in time and space.

An early draft of Anthony Coburn’s script for ‘An Unearthly Child’ has a more sinister twist to it regarding the abduction scene (see Chapter One). It is implied that the Doctor should actually kill Ian and Barbara (Miss Canning in the early draft). It is clear that Susan (Suzanne in the early draft) is scared of him. One line preserved from this macabre segment in the final programme is where Susan tells the teachers that he (the Doctor) won’t let them go, whereupon the Doctor laughs to himself, enjoying the terror he is inflicting.

Doctor Who
creator Sydney Newman correctly had the threat of murder cut from the final script: it went too far. Instead of being a man of wonder, the Doctor was suddenly a homicidal maniac, something Tom Baker’s Doctor would accuse doubleagent Kellman of in ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ 12 years – and three leading actors – later. Newman also wanted the explanation of why the Doctor and Susan were in a junkyard in 1963 cut from the script. The point was to keep the sense of mystery implied in the title: Doctor Who? A question that existed for 50 years and was noted as the oldest question in the show’s history. It is this shaping of the original script by Newman, the genius behind
Doctor Who
, that provided the most perfect starting point for the show; the firm base from which future success would be built. We further appreciate this, in a visual way, when looking at the pilot episode. It lacked polish in certain areas so Newman rejected it. Unusually, he didn’t sack the producer and director responsible; he decided to
give them another go. They then made the subtle changes that created the perfection that has now endured and expanded over 50 years. ‘An Unearthly Child’ is a classic example of understating the grand theme in order to perpetuate a legend for so long. Was this by default? No, it was what Newman wanted all along. He didn’t want anyone to know who the Doctor and Susan were, and he wanted things to be totally different. No strapping into seats at the main console (see the early draft of the script), no rocket ships.

Carole Ann Ford, the actress who played Susan, didn’t see the early draft script and therefore didn’t understand that she wasn’t the Doctor’s granddaughter after all: she was a princess or queen saved by the good-hearted Doctor, who whisked her away, just as he did every other companion thereafter. If Ford had known the original intention of the scriptwriter, maybe she would have approached the character in a different way. She always maintained that she enjoyed being the Doctor’s granddaughter and the very title gives her far more authority than any other travelling companion, but sadly the intention was for her never to have been part of the Doctor’s family: she is an orphan, her mother and father are dead in a fabled story that started the Doctor’s travels.

‘An Unearthly Child’ was painstakingly shaped by the writer, the creator, the producer and director, shot and reshot, in order to get things perfect and, looking back with what we now know, we can confirm that it is perfect. This process of writing and reshooting wouldn’t happen today; it was rare for yesterday. Newman had a vision and he knew that the young, talented and quite feisty Verity Lambert had what it took to bring that clear vision to the screen. That is why ‘An Unearthly Child’ is a one-episode story in itself. The story that follows is a three-part caveman story that doesn’t work as well. This is probably why
the first
Doctor Who
novelisation has an introduction to the characters (based upon an earlier idea called ‘Nothing at the End of the Lane’) coupled with the second full story ‘The Daleks’, the story that introduced the homicidal pepper-pots and made the show immortal. For the author of the novel not to include elements of ‘An Unearthly Child’ doesn’t do it an injustice. The novel was written by David Whittaker, who had submitted his own idea for a first episode at the same time as Anthony Coburn – he was simply allowed to explore his alternative version of the first ever episode in his novel.

‘The Daleks’ is important because it proved that Verity Lambert was the right person for the programme. Newman insisted that he didn’t want ‘bug-eyed monsters’ in the show, he wanted quality, believable scripts; he wanted to teach children about history, and to have the Doctor and his companions float around time and space to do just that. It was a lovely concept, so he absolutely exploded when he saw the Daleks for the first time, but Lambert appeased him by saying that they were humans in the future who had to live in protective casing because of high radiation. She got away with it – just – and later, Newman admitted that he was wrong to criticise her and her ‘bug-eyed monsters’. He knew the Daleks were the reason for
Doctor Who
’s lasting success, not stories featuring Marco Polo or the Aztecs. The soaring viewing figures every time the Daleks appeared vindicated that. And that is the crucial point: it took the young Verity Lambert to push that envelope as far as possible.
Doctor Who
had become more than one man’s dream. It was Verity Lambert’s dream too, and let’s not forget William Hartnell. He was thrilled to play in a children’s programme, to break his typecasting and do something completely different. This was the beginning of the tight-knit
Doctor Who
family. No matter what mix has come together over the years, the actors,
writers and production staff appear to bond to create a passionate, winning team. Unfortunately (or fortunately) they also seem to leave together too – a good example of this being the end of Patrick Troughton’s era. When Troughton announced that he was to quit the show, both his companions (played by Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury) did so too, creating a total cut-off point between the atmospheric black and white era at the end of the 1960s and the more heroic colour version of the show at the turn of the 1970s.

Although ‘An Unearthly Child’ changed the face of TV, it was a delayed reaction. It didn’t happen on the evening of 23 November 1963. After The Beatles had left the stage and older Liverpool fans had been moved on after last orders, the people of Britain went to their beds more mindful of the assassination of President Kennedy the previous day than thoughts of the first ever episode of a new children’s TV programme. The very fact that that first episode was repeated the following week vindicates this. It had been largely overlooked and no one was any the wiser. But it’s not surprising: people weren’t expecting a big deal. Even though
The Radio Times
had placed it as a future highlight in its previous week’s issue and the latest issue included a profile piece about the new show, as well as mentioning it on the cover, the British public was happy to reserve judgement and indeed show indifference to cavemen, but not so those dreaded Daleks.

Dalekmania became for children what Beatlemania was for the new-found teenager. And by default, a 52 weeks TV show became a 50-plus years TV phenomenon. Very few monsters during the first Doctor’s incarnation took over children’s imagination as much as the Daleks. The BBC tried to push the Zarbi – through a novelisation and a story in the very first
Doctor Who
annual (1965), after their first
appearance in the second season – but they never returned. In fact it wasn’t until William Hartnell’s very last story, ‘The Tenth Planet’, that we encountered foes as impressive as the Daleks: the Cybermen. And the very fact that Daleks and Cybermen are staples of the show in the new millennium proves the Hartnell years are still incredibly significant to the current culture. But great monsters are not always needed. We take the very first episode of
Doctor Who
for granted nowadays. Look upon it as a quaint, maybe a modest introduction to the world of the Doctor, but we would be wrong to think that way. The show avoided cliché. There had never been a programme with opening music like
that
before. Creepy, haunting, it altered the mindset of the watcher, clearing away the worries of everyday life to stimulate the boundless imagination of the viewer.

This mindset was also something US TV science fiction series
Star Trek
would also do well from its inception in the mid-sixties.
Star Trek
was the brainchild of Gene Roddenberry. It was an optimistic vision of the future of the human race, where Russians, Chinese and Africans would sit alongside their Western counterparts – an elite, united group, who would work to push the barriers of human knowledge and ‘Boldy Go Where No One Had Gone Before’. It was perhaps the possible dream-state inspired by the liberal John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, although they would be assassinated for such foresight. But TV creators such as Sydney Newman and Gene Roddenberry, alongside quality writers such as Robert Bloch and Terry Nation, kept the dreams alive. Where Kennedy wanted a man on the moon by the end of the decade, visionaries were united in the deeper mysteries of the universe. Not just writers but designers were important too. The magnificent design of the starship
Enterprise
and the
innovative design of the Daleks richly enhanced the popularity of each show, impressing audiences with the practical imagination at work behind the scenes, turning a writer’s vision into something sophisticated.
Star Trek
, like
Doctor Who,
was all about teamwork. The Doctor and his companions, like Kirk and his crew, are the dedicated team that thwart evil, while at the same time there was a dedicated team behind the camera too.