Many television series start off slowly and
build as they go on through the weeks and, if they are lucky, years. There are
few television programmes, surely, that can have produced one of their very
best episodes first time out. But I will set out my stall here straight away
and declare that I believe An Unearthly
Child to be one of the very finest single episodes of Doctor Who there has ever been. The series has produced a few –
very few – episodes to match this down the years, but it has never been bettered.
I would even go so far as to suggest this
may be one of the finest examples of British television of the 1960s. It sounds
like hyperbole, but it’s so magnificently constructed that it’s hard to think
that if it had been a one-off play made for something like Thirty-Minute Theatre, it wouldn’t be regarded as an all-time
classic – if it had survived, of course. As it is, it stands as a fine opening
to a classic series, and lays down the basics of the show while at the same
time creating the sense of mystery and enigma that is always at the heart of
good Doctor Who.
There’s a dark, sinister magic to this
episode, hints and suggestions and questions raised, and a brooding atmosphere
of mystery and suspense. Much of this is down to the excellent direction of
Waris Hussein, no doubt helped – as the performers must also have been – by
being able to make the whole episode twice, practicing and refining what they
wanted to do and discarding what didn’t work.
I haven’t seen a huge amount of Hussein’s
work – only this serial and A Passage to
India – but he does seem to have a recurring trademark of beginning and /
or ending scenes with a close-up on one particular object on the set that may
have absolutely no relevance to anything else going on in the scene. We see
this here with the close-up shot of the dummy head at one point, as well as scenes
being ended with pans in to close up on Susan reading the book about the French
Revolution and in the very first scene, the TARDIS door panel.
Speaking of that first scene, it’s a bit of
a strange one, and like much that Hussein does in the episode wouldn’t be seen
in Doctor Who again for some time.
After the initial atmospheric shots of the policeman walking along the dark and
moody London street – and how good does it look to get some moody lighting for a
change, which can’t have been easy in Lime Grove D by all accounts? – the
officer wanders out of shot and the camera closes up on the junkyard gates. They
creek open for us, the viewers, with the camera suddenly becoming a participant
in the action and breaking down the fourth wall very firmly as we creep up to
this police box which seems to be… humming?
It’s so easy to take all of this for
granted now, because we’re so used to it, the images are so ingrained within us
and our culture that from a 2006 perspective it is impossible to imagine how
different and strange all of this must have been. What’s so special about that
police box? What is the noise that it’s making? How does it all fit together
with this Doctor we’ve been promised in the title of the show?
Nowadays we’d know half, if not all, of
these answers before the show aired, not simply because of the internet and
fandom and so forth, but because that’s the way television works now. The basic
premise and even plots of shows are put out in publicity material and newspaper
previews for days and even weeks before a show goes out. How many of you who
sat down to watch the first episode of Life
on Mars didn’t know what was about to unfold for DCI Sam Tyler?
But I’m getting ahead of myself. In a neat
piece of scripting and direction this humming police box is left hanging as an
intriguing enigma for now, and from the dark and dingy junkyard that might even
have belonged to Albert and Harold Steptoe, we fade into a typical school
corridor, brightly-lit and with a gaggle of children eager for home. I
mentioned Steptoe & Son just
there, and such imagery is important because it’s an indication of just how
firmly rooted this episode is in the here and now of when it was made, late
1963. Gary Gillatt once made the point in From
A-Z that the two girls who are mocked by the young Kenneth Williams
impersonator here could almost be Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler, the
Profumo girls, and while that’s something of a stretch such links and
connections are not impossible to imagine in the minds of the audience watching
at home that cold November night.
It’s into this very ordinary, everyday
world of the viewer, the same world Ian and Barbara – our audience
identification characters – inhabit, that a mystery begins to unfold. This
episode was the work of three very skilful writers – C. E. Webber, Anthony
Coburn and David Whitaker – and you get the sense that rather than too many
cooks spoiling the broth, here the re-writes and edits allowed what was weak to
be cast away and what was good to be refined to a razor-sharp edge that still
cuts now, forty-plus years later. It’s wonderfully constructed, the layers of
the mystery being gradually peeled back like those of an onion.
Susan Foreman – an enigma. Who is she? Who
is her mysterious grandfather? So many questions and so few answers, as after a
brief encounter with this odd girl we’re back out onto the dark and foggy
London streets, with these two teachers who have already gained our sympathy,
even if Ian does seem a shade too keen on the melodramatic idea of following
Susan home. It’s in these scenes in Ian’s car that the first little shivers of
the epic, enormous saga about to unfold across British television are first
felt, the slightest little tremor in Barbara’s foreboding words: “I feel as if
we’re about to interfere in something that is best left alone…”
There’s be no good fiction in people
leaving alone the unusual, however, so Susan must be followed into the junkyard
where there is no sign of her, and here we are again with that humming police
box. They both notice the humming, and again it’s easy to forget now but the
fact that Ian walks all the way around
the box is vital, as the audience has to be shown that it doesn’t lead
anywhere, or the magic of what is about to unfold will be lost. The TV Movie, Doctor Who’s second attempt at a first
episode, made one of its critical errors here, when it failed to include its
‘walking all the way around’ scene until after
we’d already been shown the interior. Even Russell T Davies seems to have
neglected this most basic of devices – according to the man himself on the DVD
commentary, it was director Keith Boak who added it to Rose, first episode number three.
It’s a brave series that doesn’t introduce
its leading character until halfway through its first episode, but here we are
twelve minutes in and only now does the Doctor arrive, although we’re not told
for certain that’s who he is for a while yet. This strange, slightly sinister
and certainly evasive old man certainly doesn’t seem like much of a hero, but
he is intriguing from the outset, and like Ian and Barbara – because of Ian and Barbara, through
whose eyes all this actions unfolds – we immediately want to know more about
him.
William Hartnell gets a lot of stick from Doctor Who fans for his faults. I know a
great deal of it is affectionate and there is a high regard from many for the fact
that it was he who launched and sustained the series with his performance, but
too often he is damned with faint praise. Well, not here. He is absolutely
bloody amazing in this episode. He doesn’t put a foot wrong, and from the time
he turns up he absolutely owns it. His performance – again helped by the fact
that he’s had the chance to do it a second time, refine what wasn’t working and
accentuate what was – is by turns dark, humorous, eccentric and angry. He has
some great moments, particularly when conversationally toying with Ian and his
incomprehension at what he sees inside the TARDIS. I love in particular the
sequence where Ian is desperate to try and understand what’s going on and
questions the Doctor, who casually talks to himself over Ian, chattering away
about a clock that needs repairing.
I think I can say all you need to know
about some Doctor Who fans when I
tell you that I once saw it seriously suggested by one reviewer that this
little scene was a fluff, and Hartnell had spoken over Russell’s lines by
mistake.
It’s not just Hartnell, though. All of the
cast are superb – Ford probably being more alien and strange than she was ever
allowed to be again; Hill perfectly embodying the caring, curious teacher, and
Russell working well as the square-jawed hero struggling to come to terms with
his world being turned completely upside-down.
Which it has been by the interior of the
ship, the TARDIS. An iconic piece of design that was by all accounts thrown
together in a rush by a designer who hated the show, it works, and it works
particularly because of the suddenness with which Hussein presents it to us. There’s
no build-up, no warning, just Barbara rushing into the ship and – bam! Bright
white lights, gleaming electronic equipment, and … it’s bigger on the inside!
One of the simplest yet most ingenious and at the same time maddest ideas of
television drama, and yet one that sadly holds little or no amazement these
days. Yes, we know it’s bigger on the
inside.
Nobody did then though. Then, they would
have assumed perhaps that this strange old man really did have Susan locked up in that old box. That’s pretty dark stuff
for a children’s teatime adventure serial of any era, but then Doctor Who has never been your typical
early evening adventure serial, this episode even less so. Dark and sinister
magic indeed. What is going to happen to them all? Where have they landed? Why
wouldn’t the Doctor let them go? Will they ever get home? Questions, questions
and few if any answers given. That’s what Doctor
Who should be about – darkness and adventure and mystery.
I even think the collapse into unconsciousness
of Ian and Barbara on their first TARDIS journey works, creating the idea of
something dangerous going on. Ian’s fall might not be the most realistic ever
seen on television, but even if we’re going to pick up on the episode’s
niggling little faults like that, there’s little substance to grab at. The
Kenneth Williams kid at the start, perhaps, although he’s hardly a major
problem. The oh-so-fake laughter of one of the children mocking Susan for her
lack of knowledge of British currency… That’s about all I can think of, and it
matters not a jot.
While it’s true to say that the first Dalek
serial was what catapulted Doctor Who
into the televisual stratosphere, you have to wonder whether anybody would have
been watching those few weeks in had the opening episode not been so terrifically
strong. There has simply never been a better piece of Doctor Who – television, audio, book, webcast, comic strip,
chocolate bar wrapper – than this. Indeed, for those who were watching back on
November the twenty-third nineteen sixty-three, you have to wonder if they
didn’t think that the whole thing was downhill from hereon in.
A classic for all the eras, and a true
television masterpiece.
Barbara Wright, here played by Mrs Krabappel, attempts to strike up conversation with the dashing new science teacher, Ian Chesterton. The 'in' she uses? Some cock and bull story about a pupil, Susan Foreman. And in yet more foreshadowing, they all but refrain from calling Susan, Martin Prince, as they suggest that they should just hand the class over to her. 
Because, you see, Susan is that most terrible of people. A girly swot. She's described as letting her knowledge out a little at a time. But from the looks of the rest of her adventures she's all but a spent force after this one episode. Susan listens to some novelty ring-tones from John Smith and the Common Men - surely there's some sort of sub-Spinal Tap style rockumockumentary waiting to be explored there.
