Timeless Adventures (3 page)

The stories listed in this second report that were considered suitable for adapting were time-travel adventure
Guardians of Time
by Poul Anderson, alien-invasion drama
Three to Conquer
by Eric Frank Russell, immortality tale
Eternity Lost
by Clifford Simak, trick story
Pictures Don’t Lie
by Catherine McLean (aliens invade in tiny ships and drown in a puddle, later satirised by Douglas Adams in
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
), a Frankenstein-type tale
No Woman Born
by CL Moore, the humorous
The Cerebrative Psittacoid
by H Nearing Jr and a story of adventure and exploration,
The Ruum
by Arthur Forges.

Sydney Newman’s own interest in science fiction, combined with the 1962 reports, which Baverstock and Donald Wilson brought to his attention, resulted in him issuing a brief to the drama department. He requested that they develop a full proposal for a science-fiction anthology series, consisting of a number of self-contained, short serials, to run for 52 weeks of the year, to fill the early-evening Saturday slot. The development of
Doctor Who
had begun.

Responding to Sydney Newman’s directive, Baverstock and Wilson put together a committee to build upon the survey group’s 1962 findings and develop a proposal for the Saturday-early-evening, sciencefiction, family show. At the initial meeting on 26 March 1963 were Wilson, two of the authors of the 1962 report, Alice Frick and John Braybon, and script-department adapter Cecil Edwin Webber. According to Frick’s notes of the meeting, Wilson suggested a series based around a time-travelling machine and those who used it. Crucially, Wilson maintained that the machine should not only travel forwards and backwards in time, but also into space and even ‘sideways’ into matter itself (suggesting other dimensions). Frick herself preferred the idea of a ‘flying saucer’ vehicle, very in vogue since the phrase was coined following US pilot Kenneth Arnold’s sightings of 1947. She felt the saucer would be a better ship as it could contain a group of people, unlike (she assumed) a time machine that, in the style of HG Wells’ time traveller in his novel
The Time Machine
, would only allow an individual to travel. Wilson wanted the new show to steer clear of anything computer-related, as this had featured quite heavily in the BBC’s recent
Andromeda
serials. The telepathy idea from the original report was reconsidered, but not thought to be central to any possible series. Braybon suggested basing a future-set series around a group of scientific trouble-shooters who would investigate rogue science and scientists (this idea would later surface in slightly different form on the BBC in the 1970s as
Doomwatch
and in the twenty-first century as US TV show
Fringe
). Each individual serial within the overall series could be devoted to exploring the impact of a single scientific idea, suggested Braybon.

In developing a format for the proposed early-evening series, Wilson explained that the show must be built around a central group of continuing characters. Different members of the group could come to prominence in different serials, with others dropping into the background (a very modern drama structure now followed by soaps and TV drama). He felt that, in order to ensure the younger audience tuned in, at least two of the characters should be teenagers, while Frick felt that the teen audience would prefer to watch characters slightly older than themselves, possibly in their 20s. Two key problems were identified: how would the group be exposed to ‘wildly differing’ adventures and how would they be transported to the different settings and environments that the serial nature of the show dictated? CE Webber was tasked with coming up with a cast of characters who could form the central group that would feature in the series.

Within the core of the subjects discussed at this meeting are the roots of
Doctor Who
as it would eventually come to the TV screen in November 1963, but the specifics were lacking. The committee approach, building on the previous work, came up with the idea of a group of characters travelling through time and space in a vehicle of some sort and enjoying/enduring a variety of different adventures each week. The task now would be to add the detail of the characters and pin down some of the specifics of the concept. Webber’s subsequent character notes suggested a ‘handsome young man hero’, a ‘well-dressed heroine aged about 30’, and a ‘maturer man with a character twist’. Webber’s notes also went on to explore in more detail the scientific-trouble-shooters concept.

In April 1963, the notes from these meetings were given to Sydney Newman, who promptly annotated them in his regular brusque manner. He discounted the idea of a flying-saucer vehicle, and next to the trouble-shooters concept he simply scribbled a curt: ‘No.’ Next to Webber’s character list he added: ‘Need a kid to get into trouble, make mistakes.’ Newman approved of Wilson’s time-space machine idea and added that the show should be more like the exciting 1930s and 1940s cinema adventure serials than the old-fashioned and worthy traditional BBC children’s dramas. Newman latched on to Webber’s older man character, suggesting he should be older than the suggested 35–40, perhaps a frail, grumpy old man who has stolen the time-space machine from his own people. Perhaps he could come from an advanced civilisation on a faraway planet? This character would be called ‘the Doctor’. In this synthesis of the survey group’s ideas with his own off-the-cuff inspiration and his knowledge of socially relevant literary science fiction, Sydney Newman had devised the flexible and lasting concept of
Doctor Who
.

In May 1963, BBC staff director/producer Rex Tucker was appointed as a caretaker producer for the as-yet-unnamed new programme until Sydney Newman could find a permanent producer for his slowly gestating Saturday-series idea. Tucker brought a recently hired, young and enthusiastic TV director, Richard Martin, to the show, but he intended to direct the first episodes himself. In the summer of 1963, while the BBC bureaucracy prepared for the forthcoming show by allocating studio space at BBC Lime Grove and booking facilities personnel, the creative work in devising the series was still being done. Based on further meetings, Webber drafted a formal format document for the series, accepting Newman’s cliff-hanger serial idea by describing each subsequent 25-minute episode as starting by ‘repeating the closing sequence or final climax of the preceding episode’. A ‘moderate’ budget would be available, but the show should use ‘repeatable sets’ where possible and potential writers should not be afraid of calling for ‘special effects to achieve the element of surprise essential in these stories’.

The characters who were to go on the adventures had been further refined and now had names and character traits. They were Biddy, a ‘with it’ 15-year-old; Miss Lola McGovern, a 24-year-old schoolmistress at Biddy’s school; and Cliff, a ‘strong and courageous’ schoolmaster of 27 or 28. Newman’s now central ‘old man’ character had become the Doctor, ‘a frail old man lost in time and space’. His ‘name’ has been given to him by the others as they don’t really know who he is. Webber’s character description gave this draft Doctor a form of amnesia: ‘He seems not to remember where he has come from; he is suspicious and capable of sudden malignancy; he seems to have some undefined enemy; he is searching for something as well as fleeing from something. He has a machine which enables them to travel together through time, through space, and through matter.’

Webber wanted writers of subsequent serials to explore the ‘mystery’ of who the Doctor was, with no one single explanation necessarily being definitive. He did, however, provide two ‘secrets’ that the series could reveal when the time was right. The Doctor had stolen the time-space machine when he fled from his own people, having ‘opted out’ as he objected to their ongoing scientific progress (later seen as reflecting the growing 1960s ‘hippie’ pop culture of ‘tuning in and dropping out’ from society). Casting the rebel Doctor as the ultimate conservative, though, Webber mentions his ‘hatred of scientists, inventors, improvers. He malignantly tries to stop progress (the future) wherever he finds it, while searching for his ideal (the past)’. The second secret had the Doctor’s own people in pursuit of him, out to stop him ‘monkeying with time, because his secret intention is to destroy or nullify the future’. In drafting this document, Webber became
Doctor Who
’s second godfather, adding the essential mystery element (who is the Doctor?) and developing the backstory that he stole his time-space machine and is on the run from his own people.

As before, the document went to Sydney Newman for review. Accepting the parts he’d suggested, Newman violently objected to Webber’s detailed characterisation of the Doctor, writing on the document that the Doctor should be ‘a kind of father figure. I don’t want him to be a reactionary!’ While this Doctor’s desire to fight the future and retreat into the past might have reflected Webber’s political feelings, it certainly didn’t chime with Newman, or his project of trying to drag the BBC – through its drama productions – into the soon-to-be-swinging, anti-reactionary, positively progressive 1960s. Against the paragraph outlining the Doctor’s mission to ‘nullify the future’, Newman bluntly scribbled ‘Nuts!’ In nixing this character idea, Newman probably saved the nascent series from a short, ignominious run. The Doctor’s accepting, tolerant and open character would be a large part of the series’ ongoing success with subsequent generations, regardless of the actor playing the role at any given time. It would be the one core element of the character that remained unchanged.

Under Newman’s direction the character of the Doctor was revised to become a scientist figure, albeit of the amateur, self-educated variety. He was old, maybe 650 according to one document, and occasionally forgetful, tetchy and selfish, but he was not to be evil. He was to be a positive force for good, an autodidact always open to learning something new, while being immensely knowledgeable. Although the other characters might be suspicious of him and his motives initially, they would all eventually become trusted friends and allies. This was, after all, intended as a Saturday early-evening TV serial aimed at a family audience: the central character couldn’t be too much of an antihero, even in the 1960s. The character had now been dubbed ‘Dr Who’, reflecting his unknowable nature. There is an echo of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo in the naming of the character, with Nemo being Latin for ‘no one’. There is some dispute as to whether Tucker or Newman came up with the new name, but it stuck, attached as it was to all the various revisions of the character description. Eventually, the central character’s ‘name’ would become the title of the show, in the fuller form of
Doctor Who
.

As 1963 progressed, attention within the BBC drama department turned to the detailed nature of the Doctor’s time-space machine. With a flying-saucer-type vehicle having been roundly rejected by Newman, Wilson and the team developing
Doctor Who
had to think of something else. Much of the basic time-travel concept of the series had come from a literary classic very familiar to post-war British readers: HG Wells’
The Time Machine
. The problem with the type of time machine featured in Wells’ philosophical social satire was that, built as it was around an Edwardian saddle, it could only comfortably carry one passenger at a time. How would the Doctor and his several friends travel through time if only one of them could sit down and the others had to hang on? Something else had to be devised. The answer came from another British children’s literary classic: CS Lewis’s
Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
.

In his format document, Webber attempted to avoid giving the Doctor’s time-space machine any form at all, as he simply couldn’t devise a solution that the BBC could afford on a weekly TV budget. He didn’t want a ‘transparent plastic bubble’ or the clichéd spaceship from ‘low-grade space fiction [and] cartoon strip’. His solution was an absence of a ship, a ‘shape of nothingness’ into which the Doctor and his companions could pass to enter. In his notes in response to this, Newman criticised Webber’s concept as ‘not visual’, feeling that a ‘tangible symbol’ was needed for the ship.

Webber had provided the answer in his document, but it took others to spot it. In his struggles to describe the ship while avoiding science-fictional clichés he suggested ‘something humdrum… such as a night-watchman’s shelter’ through which the Doctor and the gang could pass to ‘arrive inside a marvellous contrivance of quivering electronics’. Webber further suggested that the ship could adopt ‘some contemporary disguise’ wherever it went, and that ‘many visual possibilities can be worked out’. He concluded that the ship could be ‘a version of the dear old Magic Door’.

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’.