Nothing At The End of the Lane (2)

This is the first part of an essay on An Unearthly Child which has already appeared on my Patreon.

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1963

0.0 - 0.28
The wavy line; like a rocket trail or an oscilloscope.

What is surprising is how consistent the title sequence remained for so long. The words “Doctor Who” forming as if from the ripples in a space-pond. The diamond shaped waves; the lava-lamp shapes; the coffee cup-swirl: these were part and parcel of the show until the big blue space tunnel came along in Jon Pertwee’s last-but-one season. That was also when the coloured triangular logo came in, replacing the words Doctor and Who in plain white-on-black type-face. A show that had long since lost its high seriousness.

It’s the boom dubba bom/boom dubba bom over the vapour trail that gives us notice that this is not a normal theme tune and this is not a normal TV show. Each subsequent version made the tune grander and louder and less unearthly. Some versions want it to be a march. They give undue prominence to the “bom-diddy/bom diddy-bom” that plays over the closing credits—the one part which sounds like normal, human, hum-able music. That is not the sound which defines the show.

0.28-2.00
The music continues to play over the first scene: intrusively, surprisingly. In the seventies, there was a clear demarcation between the opening credits and the story itself. Doctor Who. Death To The Daleks. By Terry Nation. Part One. The boundary was marked by a whoosh or a howl or a budda-budda-budda. But in the ancient black and white universe the title of the episode and the name of the writer appear over the action in plain, ordinary, white on black writing. Like any episode of Crossroads or Blue Peter. As if Doctor Who doesn’t yet know it is Doctor Who.

It was supposed to be transmitted at 5.15pm. It was followed by the Goons and Juke Box Jury and then, at about 6.30, by Dixon of Dock Green. “The story of a London policeman on his beat.” The very first person to appear in Doctor Who, as everyone knows, is Reg Cranfield. Unnamed and uncredited. A London policeman. On his beat.

A coincidence, probably. But as a matter of fact, ownership of Saturday night was about to move on. Jack Warner must decrease while William Hartnell must increase.

We move from the abstract title sequences to a point of view shot. Someone is looking at the policeman, and we are looking through their eyes. That someone opens the gates, and walks through the junk yard to the police box. It’s a standard horror trope; one that Doctor Who will use many, many times. Show us what the monster or the murderer sees without showing us the monster or the murderer.

But it means we open with a question. Who has just waited for the policeman to leave and entered the dark junk yard?

The unearthly music has stopped. The title card appears on the screen. An Unearthly Child by....some writer whose name escapes me.

A child? What child? We haven’t seen a child?

The viewpoint character advances to the door: looks at it.

Is presumably about to go through it.

And dissolve to:


2.00 - 4.36
A noticeboard: Coal Hill School; very much the kind of place where you would expect to find children, unearthly or otherwise. It’s a modern school. There is a bell and a blackboard and a house system, but the children aren’t wearing uniforms, although the boys seem to have jackets and ties.

The first audible words identify the eponymous character: “You can wait in there, Susan” says an older woman, obviously a teacher. But in fact, if we strain, the first words may actually be “Goodnight, Miss Wright.”

Television is artifice; but it has ways of conveying “realism”. Terry Nation’s Survivors (for example) doesn’t depict a plague attacking modern England so much as a plague attacking the world of BBC situation comedies. Safe, suburban, C&A blouses and Peter Bowles. The opening moments of Doctor Who don’t feel like Doctor Who because there is no Doctor Who for them to feel like. But they don’t feel like children’s TV. No-one is talking down to anyone else. Almost, slightly, they feel like a documentary. It’s not a school-story, but an actual school. Reality as mediated by BBC drama. It’s not Saint Trinians or Tom Browns Schooldays or Whacko. It’s certainly not Grange Hill. I would say it felt like Play For Today if I had ever seen an episode of Play For Today.

Sydney Newman understood television. His first series for ITV laid out the new medium’s credentials very succinctly: Armchair Theatre. Unearthly Child is best thought of as a stage-piece: very deftly and skilfully constructed. We meet the characters in reverse order of importance. First, we meet Barbara; Barbara goes to see Ian. Ian and Barbara talk about Susan and then they talk about the Doctor. And then they have a scene with Susan; and then they have a scene with the Doctor; and then the four principles come together for the big final scene.

I am not knocking it. It is very well done. The classic rep theatre mystery begins with the Butler standing upstage and telling the Housekeeper that he supposes it all started with the reading of the late master’s will. Doctor Who begins with two teachers. The male teacher is worried because a student seems cleverer than he is. The female teacher is worried because the same student’s guardian won’t allow her to have extra tuition at home; and because the home address seems not to exist. We, watching from our armchairs, were given the solution on our way in: the child will turn out to be unearthly. It’s a set up, an info dump, bringing us up to speed about the basic situation. But it very skilfully and delightfully sets up the characters of the teachers. I wonder if any two characters have ever been more economically introduced than in those first lines of Doctor Who.

MAN: Not left yet?

WOMAN: Obviously not!

MAN: Ask a silly question...

WOMAN: I’m sorry.

MAN: That’s all right. I’ll forgive you this time.

The woman talks in a severe “teacher voice” all the time: if anything, she is more informal with her pupil than with her colleague. The man is light-hearted and ironic; but relapses into schoolmaster mode when in the presence of the girl. The woman is Miss Wright first and only subsequently Barbara; the man is introduced as Ian but then called Mr Chesterton. Ian washes his hands carefully at the end of the day (he teaches chemistry); Barbara tells him to pay attention; he indicates that he has been.

Who are the two girls in the school corridor? What is the paper they are looking at? Who is the boy? Why does he tease them? What impact does their acquaintance with Susan have on the rest of their lives? Spin-offs have been built on flimsier questions.

4:36 - 6.20
Why is Susan so clever? Why won’t her grandfather allow her history teacher to give her extra home tuition? Why does her address not exist?

In the second scene we meet the mysterious girl. And she doesn’t seem very mysterious at all, which is the most mysterious thing about her. She has a posh accent and likes pop music. She prefers to walk home than take a lift with her teachers. And she spots a mistake in her teacher’s history book.

She is listening to the music on her own. She is not pretending to be normal for Ian and Barbara’s benefit. Maybe the hand-jive is meant to seem a little bit alien; I think it is just meant to look “with-it”. I have heard it said that she looks elfin; that she looks like a younger Audrey Hepburn. But most people would surely look at her hair and think of John, Paul, Ringo and George.

With the Beatles, with the monochrome Hamburg portraits on the cover came out the day before An Unearthly Child, November 22nd 1963. The date was overshadowed by another event. A month before, in October, Bob Dylan had told the straights that their sons and their daughters were beyond their command.

Susan is an alien teenager; but all teenagers are alien. It is 1963 and children are by definition unearthly.

6:20 - 9:38
Scene 3: Ian and Barbara have followed Susan to her mysterious home, and they continue to talk about her. The three flashbacks don’t take us very far. Ian is astonished by her advanced knowledge of chemistry; Barbara is astonished that she doesn’t understand the English currency system; Ian manages to confuse her with a very simple geometry question. “You can’t solve the problem using only three of the dimensions!” sums up the tone of the show about as well as anything could.

Barbara snaps “don’t be silly”. Ian ironically breaths “with time being the fourth, I suppose?” The past is a foreign country. Sarcasm in the classroom will not be stopped for a few years yet.

“I feel frightened” says Barbara “As though we were interfering with something that is best left alone”. Not, perhaps, the subtlest lines ever written. And suddenly, we get a glimpse of Susan; already in the junk yard. She pops something into her mouth. (A gobstopper? A jelly baby? An alien food tablet?) And we catch a glimpse of a manikin; possibly a shop window dummy. It’s head is smashed in, and it is hanging by what can only be described as a noose. And we flash back to Ian and Barbara. “Lets get it over with” says Ian, as if he were about to ingest some unpleasant medicine, or maybe punish one of his pupils.


9:38-11.38Scene 4. Ian and Barbara walk around the junkyard. We see the hanged manikin again. We see the police box. It is humming: buzzing. It has never hummed or buzzed since. The humming and the buzzing clues us in that it is perhaps an unearthly police box. And (this is a little clunky) it provides a pretext for Ian to walk around it.

11:39-12:07
“A little more than kin, and less than kind.”

“I perceive that you have been in Afghanistan.”

“Gosh, uncle Ben, you're worse than a room full of alarm clocks.”

A world historical moment. An old man appears. He is coughing. We don’t know his name, and we never will.

“What are you doing here...What do you want?”

He has come on to the stage, and will never vacate it.

12:07-14:30
When George Lucas first shows us Yoda, he is an annoying sprite who knocks things over. If we were one of the very few people who saw Empire Strikes Back without spoilers, there would be a fairy tale unmasking. The smurf who won’t tell Luke where Yoda is turns out Yoda himself to be.

Ian and Barbara have followed Susan home. They encounter an annoying, patronising, condescending old man. He is Susan’s grandfather; and Susan’s grandfather is the Doctor Who of the title. But Ian and Barbara somehow do not make this connection; they somehow imagine that the old man has locked the young girl in the police box—slightly kinky for Saturday night, but not remotely meeting the facts as they know them. Susan comes to school every day, well dressed and well fed, so she can hardly be spending the evenings locked in a cell.

If there wasn’t sixty years of Doctor Who lore weighing us down; we might think that the junk yard was part of the mystery: that the old man collected junk and the police box emerged from his collection of hanged manikins and dusty picture frames. At any moment Prof Yaffle might step down from his bookend and we will put the police box in the shop window in case whoever lost it should happen to pass by.

It is a scene rich with potential. It is the last time we don’t know.

The mystery narrows. “Who is Susan?” has contracted to “what is the police box?” The old man is the answer to both questions, but his very name is a riddle. A riddle that will never be answered.

14:30
And suddenly, the universe changed.

This is the scene I remember from Panopticon. This is I suppose the scene which made me get up out of my seat and go to the front and kneel down and give my life to Doctor Who.

You can’t fit a skyscraper in a sitting room; but you can fit a TV into a sitting room and you can show a skyscraper on a TV screen. So you can fit a skyscraper in a sitting room after all.

How does this help? Those sheep are small; but those sheep are far away.

What does the Doctor suppose he is saying? Is the idea that when you step through the doors of the police box what you perceive is merely an image of the interior, transmitted from somewhere else, like the image of Dallas, Texas watched on a screen in Barnet, Hertfordshire? The early pitch documents speak of a ship which projects the characters into other modes of being.

Or is he saying that when you watch TV, you don’t perceive William Hartnell to be a Lilliputian figure barely six inches tall: your imagination turns him into a full sized man. So perhaps the TARDIS interior is very small, and Ian and Barbara’s imagination is making it seem enormous.

There is a TV in the TARDIS. We see London; and then we see the Stone Age. On the TV on the TV. And then the doors of the TARDIS open, and we see the image and the screen through the doors. And Ian and Barbara step through the doors, into the image.

We are watching Doctor Who, on TV. From the armchair, or maybe even from behind the armchair, in one of our smaller sitting rooms. TV can take us anywhere. The TARDIS is a metaphor.

By 1978 it was an in-joke. Bigger on the inside than the outside. Why is a mouse when it spins? What colour is the square root of Wednesday?

Why is it bigger on the inside?


Because it is dimensionally transcendental.

What does dimensionally transcendental mean?


It means it’s bigger on the inside.

It has become a proverb. Used by people who had never even seen Doctor Who. The oppositions motion is like the TARDIS. My granny’s cupboards were like the TARDIS.


Barbara walks through the police box door. The camera is behind her. We see her walking away from us.

Barbara walks through the TARDIS doors. The camera is in front of her. We see her walking towards us.

A reaction shot: a close up of her face.

Ian stumbles in after her: looking confused.

A quick pan around the TARDIS interior.

And pull back to see the four characters assembled in the large control room.

In my head, I was convinced that I had gone through the doors and seen them expand, and experienced knowledge-by-acquaintance of the TARDIS interior dimensions. I now see that the magic was achieved with a very quick cut. But the scene grew in my mind. It defined the magic of Doctor Who. It was bigger in the inside of my head than it was outside on the big screen.

But that was 1978, not 1963. I was not, in fact, surprised that the TARDIS was b.o.t.i.t.t.o.

But I was surprised that it was surprising. I was surprised that it had once been surprising. And I believed, for many years, that that surprising-ness was a thing that could have remained; that should have remained; that the TARDIS ceased to be surprising because later writers did not respect The Magic and that The Magic could, in theory, be brought back.

14:44 - 20:26
Scene 5. The cast is assembled. And there is nothing, in fact, left to happen.

The premise of the show is that Biddy and Cliff and Miss McGovern and Dr Who should travel through time and space and have adventures. Sidney Newman described a first episode in which two teachers walk their student home through the fog; are surprised to find that home is a police box, and are invited inside by a confused, lost, possibly quote senile unquote old man. Another early internal pitch says that once the teachers are inside the Doctor’s ship, someone accidentally presses a button and causes the ship to “slip its moorings”. This is very much what happens in the Peter Cushing Dalek movie, in fact.

But Unearthly Child, as we have it, offers a much more interesting set up. It generates actual hostility between the principles. Not only between Ian and Barbara and the Doctor, but between the Doctor and Susan.

Ian and Barbara are convinced that the TARDIS is an illusion. “A game you and your grandfather are playing, if you like”, says Barbara. The Doctor says the box can travel in space and time; Ian has a moment of wonder but rejects it as ludicrous. The Doctor retains some of the attributes of the old man in the junkyard: he fusses over a broken clock in the same way he fussed over an ornate picture frame. But he is largely in control: dominant, a wizard in his magic domain. Ian and Barbara decide to leave; but the Doctor won’t let then. He says that if they leave, the TARDIS will have to leave as well. Susan says that if the Doctor leaves earth, she will stay there. There is a brief fractional moment which should have defined her character for ever afterwards, when she is torn between her grandfather and her teachers. The Doctor over-rides her choice. He pretends to open the door, but in fact he sends the TARDIS travelling in Time. Susan is at that moment as unwilling a traveller as the two humans; although that will soon be forgotten.

In the untransmitted pilot version of the story, there is a science fictional motivation. The Doctor thinks that mere knowledge of the TARDIS will change history or violate the timelines. Barbara in particular is dangerous because she seems to believe. “My dear child, you know very well we cannot let them possess even one idea that such a ship as the TARDIS might be possible” he says to Susan. “I can’t let you go” he says to Ian. “You and your companion would be footprints in a time where you were not supposed to have walked.”

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

But this idea more or less drops out of the transmitted version. The Doctor is simply worried about being made into “a public spectacle”. The dialogue about giving humans anachronistic knowledge (which makes the Doctor and Susan one smidgeon more alien) is replaced by Susan asserting her love of 20th century England. A canny move: a theoretical argument has been replaced by a very human piece of drama.

20:26 -23.00
We see an image on the TARDIS monitor—on the TV within the TV. A London scene: but it is clearly not a view of Totters Lane. Could it be—could it possibly be—the BBC television centre?

It shrinks and recedes and is replaced by the wibbly wobbly wavy lines we saw in the opening seconds. The whirling line, the ripples; super-imposed over each characters face in turn. It takes more than a minute. For a second, there is jaunty electronic music, giving the unfortunate effect that the characters are dancing; but rapidly an extended dematerialisation sound effect kicks in. The same sound effect would be in use sixty years later. That and the police box and the word TARDIS are the only things which survive.

Ian and Barbara are unconscious. The Doctor looks uncertain. We see a sandy desert through the TV within a TV; and then we go outside. The viewpoint has changed: we are seeing what the characters cannot yet see. The police box is in the middle of a desert; and a shadow of something unpleasant falls across it.

In 1978, Time Travel was entirely ordinary: the Doctor lounged in his ship playing chess or chatting about going on holiday and then typed coordinates into the console. In this first story, Time Traveller is scary and awesome and surreal. A bit of a wrench. I read this back into the future of the series. Every TARDIS trip should have been like the first TARDIS trip and someone had somehow allowed the Magic to lapse.

And yet it was clearly the mundanity and silliness of Tom Baker that had won my heart.


Next Episode: The Cave of Skulls

Some people find the cavemen dull; some people even advise newbies to skip episodes 2-4 and rush on to the Daleks. But I think that the cavemen are an intrinsic component of the emerging myth. No-one planned them as such. But I don’t think you can experience the full joy of the scary alien robots if you haven’t followed Ian and Barbara through the primordial desert.

The end of Unearthly Child changes the viewpoint; we are outside the TARDIS, looking at a shadow falling across it. The Cave of Skulls continues this counter intuitive narrative strategy. We don’t go back to our heroes in the strange chrome room. We go first to a cave, where a modern stone age family talk articulately about losing the secret of fire and choosing a new leader before we return to the action of the first instalment. It ratchets up the dramatic irony in the next scene. Ian obstinately refuses to believe that they have travelled in time, but we, in our armchairs, in our smaller sitting rooms, know that they have.

The Doctor says that year-o-meter is broken: not calculating properly—because it says that they have gone back to Year Zero.

But Year Zero is exactly where they have gone. Before the decade was out, another science fiction epic would be opening with the Dawn of Man.

if you enjoy this kind of thing, there is more of it here 

Nothing at the End of the Lane (3)

Nothing at the End of the Lane (4)
Children in Need Special
Tales From the TARDIS
The Star Beast
Giggle
Honest To Doctor Who

The Key To Time

Ribos Operation (1)