This is the first part of an essay on An Unearthly Child which has already appeared on my Patreon.
It's my Patreon supporters who enable me to spend some days each week writing.
2024
And so, for many years, we fetishised An Unearthly Child. When John Nathan Turner took up the reigns of Doctor Who, he gave the Doctor three companions, instead of a single assistant. He made them bicker among themselves. He even made the Fifth Doctor a subordinate character in his own story. This was widely praised at the time because it was returning Doctor Who to its roots; which meant making it more like An Unearthly Child. It was almost as if the years between 1963 and 1982 had been one dreadful wrong turning.
I was delighted by an interview with Douglas Adams on the Wogan programme, in which he said that he and Graham Williams had taken the first four episodes out of the archive, intending to watch them in a spirit of ironic mockery. They were embarrassed to discover that 1960s Doctor Who was very much better than the 1970s version of the show. He added, not unintelligently, that it was the addition of colour had spoiled it. It is much easier to believe that jobbing actors in front of a painted backdrop are primeval cavemen when you are watching them in monochrome on a very small screen.
I was full of DWAS Story-Information Folders and CMS loose leaf essays and Radio Times specials. I knew all about the black and white era. But from Panopticon 2 until (I suppose) the National Film Theatre Doctor Who weekend, in or around 1987, Unearthly Child was the only black-and-white Doctor Who story I had actually seen. [*]
So the feeling developed: the Magic of Doctor Who was that quality which An Unearthly Child / Tribe of Gum possessed, but Deadly Assassin didn't. An Unearthly Child took itself seriously. Deadly Assassin did not. And the thing that Deadly Assassin was not taking seriously, the mythos -- Doctor Who's very identity -- was the very thing which An Unearthly Child worked so hard to establish. An Unearthly Child spoke the language of BBC naturalistic drama, and dropped cave men and time machines into the middle of it. An Unearthly Child was set in a gothic studio where everyone wore silly hats. An Unearthly Child was about the clash of fantasy and reality. Deadly Assassin was pure fantasy.
There is a fine irony in the fact that An Unearthly Child was transmitted less than a day after CS Lewis sadly died. It is, after all, the story of an adolescent girl named Susan, who is nearly old enough to be interested in boys. The marvellous device which takes her between the worlds is a wooden box; a wooden box which messes with time. Doctor Who is dressed up as Science Fiction, but it functions according to Narnian logic -- in fact to Looking Glass Logic. There's a magic kingdom in the bedroom closet, and a stone aged tribe in the phone box, and a set of homicidal playing cards at the bottom of the rabbit hole.
Sydney Newman initially visualised the TARDIS as a kind of magic door between worlds. Magic doorways are a staple of children's fiction. An Unearthly Child is exceptionally successful because the outer world -- the fog and the bobbie and the notice board -- and the inner world -- the fire and the skulls -- are both treated with equal conviction. But before long there would only be a single world: the world of Doctor Who.
Ian refuses to believe in the stone age, just as Peter and Susan refuse to believe in Narnia. Lewis's Professor appeals to logic: you don't definitely know that cupboards can't contain magical kingdoms; but you do definitely know that your sister is not a liar. The Doctor accepts that the TARDIS defies logical analysis and doesn't try to prove it. It comes down to faith.
"I can't help it, I just believe them, that's all" says Barbara. But Ian, not unreasonably, demands proof.
"If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cries of strange birds and watch them wheel in another sky, would that satisfy you?" asks the Doctor. Ian concedes that it would.
Direct personal experience is not, in fact, sufficient grounds to believe the impossible. In the novel, Ian briefly considers that he is hypnotised, or drugged, or dreaming: which would, in fact be a more rational position. But maintaining that rational belief would really drive him mad.
Blessed are they that have not seen, but have believed. Credo quia absurdum.
An Unearthly Child does what it does so very well that we are tempted to think that "what An Unearthly Child does" is what Doctor Who was always intended to do; and that everything since has represented a falling away from that platonic idea.
Fans were amused when a review from December 1963 came to light complaining that Cave of Skulls was not as good as An Unearthly Child: ho-ho, they said, people have been saying that Doctor Who is not as good as it used to be from before the beginning! But (assuming that the cutting is real) the journalist was in no way making a silly comment. You sold me on a mysterious story about a brilliant school girl and an alien hiding in modern London; and what you followed it with was a kids TV adventure involving cave men and spooky skulls. You offered me a well-drawn English science master and in twenty five minutes you turned him into Richard Hannay.
The scenes in the TARDIS follow directly on from Unearthly Child; the scenes in the cave are part of a completely different conceptual world. And it does seem very much as if An Unearthly Child and Tribe of Gum were conceived as separate entities. The exact process isn't known or knowable; but it certainly seems that CW Weber's lost script -- the one in which the heroes were going to be miniaturised -- began with Susan (or Sue, or Biddy) introducing Ian (or Cliff) and Barbara (or Miss McGovern) to her mysterious Grandfather. That script was rejected, not because it failed to capture the magical essence of Doctor Who, but because the BBC budget wasn't sure if it could run to Incredible Shrinking Man special effects. If we were living on another time-line, I might very well be saying that a Land of the Giants chase across Mr Chesterton's science desk was the exact and perfect way to begin Doctor Who. The familiar seen from a new angle: the ordinary made strange.
What is certain is that the writer of An Unearthly Child incorporated some elements of the CE Weber script, which were themselves based on Sydney Newman's pitch; into that un-transmitted pilot episode; and that that pilot was partially rewritten, probably by script editor David Whitaker. Changing "I was born in the fifty fourth century" to "I was born in another world, another time" would be a very Whitaker thing to do.
The impact of Unearthly Child is so great that we are tempted to pretend that, as a matter of fact, Doctor Who was always like this, right up until the moment when it wasn't.
And maybe that was even sometimes a little bit true. When I first saw the Aztecs (at the BFI) I could certainly convince myself that the proper grown up characters from the first episode were now enmeshed in a proper grown up historical drama. Dalek Invasion of Earth has quite a lot of silliness in it; but what we remember is its Orwellian, dystopian vibe: the two London school teachers carried sideways into a world where outer-space Hitler won the war. But the idea that An Unearthly Child was a tonal template could only be maintained when the black and white era was substantially lost or mislaid. It can't survive an encounter with the Sensorites or the Web Planet or the Keys of Marinus. Good stories; good Doctor Who stories; good Saturday evening telly: but much closer to Flash Gordon than Play For Today. (Not that there is anything wrong with Flash Gordon.)
Unearthly Child wrote cheques that the series itself was unable to cash. It sets up a question: who is Susan? who is the Doctor? -- to which the series never properly returns. Ian asks "who is he -- Doctor who?" but immediately loses interest in finding out the answer. The words "doctor who" became taboo; not spoken on screen for many, many years. No serious clues as to the Doctor's identity were laid down. A mutter about him having been a pioneer at the end of the Daleks, some boilerplate about alien planets in the Sensorites, and the arrival of a second time traveller in the Time Meddler, which is played for laughs. That's about all the follow up we get.
CE Weber's early treatments say that the Doctor stole his time machine (okay) and that he is being pursued by the police from his own time (makes sense) but nothing ever comes of that. You might have expected the Monk to be a central plank of the show, rather than light relief: in fact the idea of "the Doctor, but evil" doesn't occur to anyone until the second season of the colour era. The Time Lords are finally unmasked in the War Games but by then Unearthly Child is long forgotten. No-one mentions the Monk, or Susan, or the Doctor's kids, or Mrs Who. For the majority of the first ten stories, Susan is simply a kid, whose function is to scream and say things like "what is this, grandfather?" (She never calls him Granddad or Grandpa or Gramps.) The ending of Dalek Invasion of Earth -- where the Doctor kicks her out of the TARDIS to marry a mortal -- is problematic in many ways. But the big disappointment is that the two genuinely unsettling aliens have in one year turned into a generic teenager and her embarrassing Dad.
What would the time line have looked like if Charlotte Bronte had died on the eve of World War I, her early forays into romantic fiction eclipsed by a half century of mighty novels? But it is of course equally possible that a Charlotte who survived consumption would have become a dull Victorian moralist whose evangelical temperance tracts caused her promising juvenilia to be forgotten. No one is ever told what would have happened. An Unearthly Child might have been followed by a serious, cerebral piece of science fiction with heavy religious overtones, and thence into Marco Polo. And on that timeline we might be celebrating sixty years of challenging Wellsian science fiction. And if Luxormania had replaced Dalekmania perhaps the idea that science fiction is mostly about silly spaceships and silly monsters would never have taken root, and we would live in a more humane, literate world. But equally, if Sydney Newman had been less flexible about his original vision, Doctor Who might be an interesting science-and-history show that ran for 52 weeks from 1963 to 1964 and is now remembered only by TV historians.
An Unearthly Child could even be seen as getting the series off on the wrong foot. Some of the characterisation from the first story is carried over into the Dead Planet; but Edge of Destruction largely reboots the set-up. All the hostility melts away and everyone agrees to be friends. Marco Polo, probably the only story which ever got within striking distance of Newman's original concept has been inconveniently erased, and the record resumes with everyone being sent on a "collect the set" treasure hunt by a malevolent computer.
Four friends going on adventures in time and space. There is really no need for an origin. Even at the beginning we are in the middle: the TARDIS has been a sedan chair and a Greek pillar and they nearly lost it four or five journeys ago. The loss of An Unearthly Child episode is not a disaster. The Dead Planet is as good a jumping on point as any other.
[*] Full disclosure. They reshowed Unearthly Child at Panopticon 3, followed by all three Cavemen episodes: some Americans tried to take flash photography of the screen. There was a very short BFI film clip from Dalek Invasion Earth which I assume copyright applied differently to. The BBC showed Unearthly Child and Krotons as part of a retrospective, directly before Peter Davison's first appearance. Excerpts used to appear from time to time on Blue Peter; and there was a TV documentary called Whose Doctor Who? which included a few clips.
1 comment:
"Direct personal experience is not, in fact, sufficient grounds to believe the impossible. In the novel, Ian briefly considers that he is hypnotised, or drugged, or dreaming: which would, in fact be a more rational position. But maintaining that rational belief would really drive him mad."
This is a very Chestertonian observation — not just in the use of paradox but in the subject matter. He has a lot to say about this in Orthodoxy
But the other author it makes me think of is Douglas Adams, who in The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul gives this speech to his protagonist Dirk Gently:
What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? "Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".
"I reject that entirely," said Dirk, sharply. "The impossible often has a kind of
integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented
with an apparently rational explanation of something which works in all respects other
than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable?"
Post a Comment