This is the first part of an essay on An Unearthly Child which has already appeared on my Patreon.
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It's my Patreon supporters who enable me to spend some days each week writing.
1978
Time worked differently in those days. The world had only recently changed to colour and pictures from the previous decade came from a different dimension. They still called it the generation gap. Teenagers grew up in a different world from their parents. I don't know if the Beatles were literally bigger than Jesus, but history was certainly divided into Before Beatles and After Beatles.
I measured out my life in annuals. I could wind back through 1977, 1976, 1975 by looking at increasingly dog-eared Blue Peter presenters. Time stopped in 1968, Book 5. Peter Purves topless and Valarie Singleton wrapped up like an eskimo. Before that there was only Magic Roundabout and Pippin Fort.
So, in August 1978, it seemed like a very big deal. Panopticon Two, the second ever Doctor Who convention. The centrepiece: the very first episode of Doctor Who. Unseen since 1963. Fifteen whole years.
The very first episode of Doctor Who. I came on board at the same time Jon Pertwee left. The Sugar Puffs Doctor turned into the One With the Scarf. Oh, it is such a cliche to talk about "my Doctor". I think Colin Baker started it. Tom Baker was the Doctor, the only Doctor I properly knew. Jon Pertwee was a huge foundational myth from the primeval junior school era. The First and Second Doctors were as remote and mysterious as the Garden of Eden and Uncle Mac.
It was 1978 and Doctor Who wasn't as good as it used to be. The special magic had departed and even the president of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society didn't know what had happened to it.
Facebook insists I look at forums about old television programmes. There is a widespread agreement that television ceased to be funny when It Ain't Half Hot Mum and Robin's Nest came to an end. There is no excuse to ever watch anything apart from reruns of Fawlty Towers. We have moved from an age of gold into an age of brass. When King Arthur comes again, Wagon Wheels will return to their proper size and comedians will appear on television in black make up. Women will smoke during pregnancy. There will be lots of beatings.
Everyone's age is a golden age; but it is factually true that the middle 1970s produced a lot of very funny TV shows. Older comedians who had learned their trade in the last days of variety and rep were still working; but the alternative circuit hadn't yet made comedy the new rock and roll. No, we can't have Carry On back because Carry On came out of a particular moment in time and time doesn't go round and round in circles but just moves on.
I was lucky enough to have been twelve when Star Wars happened. I don't know if I'd swap that for being a generation younger and living through Beatlemania and the second folk revival.
The very first episode of Doctor Who. The BBC didn't do repeats. Not what they called "out of Doctor" repeats, anyway: when Baker assumed the throne they were reluctant to show old Pertwee episodes and certainly nothing earlier.
When this newfangled idea of showing pictures on the radio first came in, actors and writers were worried. If we're not careful, they said, the BBC will build up a library of plays and comedians and jugglers and never need to employ another one ever again. What chance for a young actor who wants to essay the Dane if the BBC already has a definitive version of Hamlet in their magic box? So agreements were made with trades unions and Actors Equity. The BBC had to go on making new TV; and very, very little old TV could be shown each year; and then not without the original actors' and writers' permission.
The Beeb was surprisingly sportsmanlike about this. They took it for granted that they had to check with Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln each time the Brigadier appeared on screen, because the Brigadier first appeared in a story wot they wrote. I suppose the DWAS had to get clearance from Equity and the Beeb. Or maybe a few hundred people at a con counted as a private showing.
An episode of Doctor Who, on the big screen. A black and white episode: the very first.
Some people can't separate Doctor Who from the night John Kennedy died. Some people can't separate it from that unseasonably cold winter. I believe my Mum and Dad were already living in the family home, two years before I materialised. They owned a black and white TV. I was the Doctor Who fan but they had actually watched Doctor Who on their TV when the world was black and white and cold and foggy.
But to me the alpha version of An Unearthly Child -- and therefore the primary experience of Doctor Who -- is the great hall at Imperial College looking at a life sized TARDIS and a life sized Dalek with a packed lunch and a tube ticket clasped to my breast. Your mileage may vary.
I don't know how many times I have watched it in the intervening decades. I saw it the following year, at Panopticon 3. I saw it in the Five Faces Of Doctor Who season on BBC 2 during the Baker-Davison interregnum. I saw it on my own TV when VHS tapes first became affordable. I saw it a few years back when I tried to watch right through the whole canon. I watched the first dozen episodes on Britbox with Sofa-Buddy during lockdown.
I know it as well as I know anything.
Someone from Sons of the Desert once said that he'd seen all the Laurel and Hardy films so many times that he no longer laughed at them: but he still watched them because he wanted to spend time with Stan and Olly. What is left of the first two seasons of Doctor Who aren't as scary as they used to be; they very probably never were. But they have that quality that CS Lewis probably did not call Donegality. The sense of time-and-place.
The ship. The stone age. The radiation needle turning to critical. A vanishing EnglandLondonBritain that had flown forgotten as a dream before I drew my first breath. An umbilical chord back to my thirteenth year; when testcard, ad-break and Radio Time were still apparelled in celestial light. Just barely.
I knew that Frankenstein was the name of the creator, not the monster. I knew that Doctor Who was the name of the series, not the character. Having seen Unearthly Child gave me one more thing to be a purist about.
Nineteen sixty three. Fifteen years ago. As far removed from me then as Blink and Last of the Time Lords is from me today.
Nineteen seventy eight. Forty seven years ago. As far removed from me now as Charlie Chaplain was from me then.
What has happened to the magic of Doctor Who?
It came true. You're looking at it.
if you enjoy this kind of thing, there is more of it here
Nothing at the End of the Lane (4)
Children in Need Special
Tales From the TARDIS
The Star Beast
Giggle
Honest To Doctor Who
Children in Need Special
Tales From the TARDIS
The Star Beast
Giggle
Honest To Doctor Who
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