Nothing At The End of the Lane (Appendix)

NOTES

ACRONYM
While Sidney Newman and Verity Lambert may have come up with the word TARDIS; it appears that the writer of Unearthly Child came up with the idea of it standing for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. It is not referenced again until the Time Meddler, by which time the word Dimension has been pluralised.

Susan says she coined the name: which would make a great deal more sense if we assume that "TARDIS" is the personal name of this particular vessel -- along the lines of "Enterprise" or "Liberator" or "Shippy McShipface".

COAL HILL SCHOOL
For many years, Coal Hill School would have been a pub quiz answer for obsessives. Then Sylvester McCoy went back there for an anniversary story. More recently, wonderful Clara became a teacher there; and there was a pointless spin off about the place. An easter egg implies that Ian Chesterton is one of the governors.

FOG
In the pitch documents, fog was a significant plot device: Ian and Barbara walk Susan home because it is foggy; or else find her and her grandfather lost in the fog. It is still foggy at the beginning of the pilot episode; but the fog clears. In the transmitted episode it has been downgraded to potential fog.

Pilot episode

SUSAN: I rather like walking in the English fog. It's sort of mysterious.

BARBARA: You say that as if...

IAN: Then we won't deprive you of that romantic pleasure.

BARBARA: Well, hurry home, Susan. And be careful, the fog's getting thicker.

*

IAN: The fog's cleared. We're lucky.

Transmitted Episode

SUSAN: I like walking through the dark. It's mysterious.

BARBARA: Be careful, Susan, there'll probably be fog again tonight.

*

IAN: We're lucky there was no fog. I'd never have found this.

It may be that we are supposed to infer that the fog we see in the opening sequence (when the policeman is checking out the junkyard) is unnatural fog; fog produced by the Ship in order to disguise itself. By 1963 the clean air act would have meant that the thick London smogs you could get lost in were receding into folk memory.

LESSONS
Ian is usually said to be a chemistry teacher: so why is he setting a Fifth Form / Year 11 class elementary geometry? (The pitch says that "Cliff" taught applied science at a Secondary Modern.) Similarly, if Barbara is a history teacher, why has the subject of English currency come in one of her lessons?

In the pilot episode, the blackboard very clearly has a note on it that says:

America 100 c = 1 $

England 20 /- = 1 £

Which suggests that she must have reacted to Susan's error by writing the true state of affairs on the board; which wasn't a particularly kind thing to do.

POLICEMAN
The story opens with a policeman checking the gates of the junk yard. In the pilot episode; Barbara notices that there is a policeman standing outside Totters Lane, suggesting that their arrival follows straight on from the pre-cred and that the school scene is a slight flashback.

When the Doctor realises that Ian and Barbara are teachers, he says "not the police then..." as if he was concerned that the officer in the pre-cred was coming to ask him questions. Shortly after they enter the junk yard, Barbara says she is going to fetch a policeman; then Ian tells the Doctor that he is going to find one; and then the Doctor dares him, twice, to do so. But no policeman appears after the opening scene.

Note that they are referred to as "policemen" throughout as opposed to "the police", "coppers" or "cops."

POLICE BOX
In Episode 2, the Doctor and Susan express surprise that the TARDIS has not changed. This is not remarked on in Dead Planet or Marco Polo.

The image of the displaced Police Box at the end of Episode One brilliantly conveys the premise of the show: an ordinary thing ending up somewhere extraordinary.

It is sometimes said that the TARDIS being fixed in a single form was a late addition to the mythos, when it was realised that creating a new prop in each story would be too expensive; but this makes very little sense. But surely it would have been easier to say that some haystack or a postbox that would have been part of the setting in any case was this month's TARDIS?

The idea that the ship was some mundane object seems to have been part of the premise at quite an early stage: it is more likely that the "stuck camouflage device" was an after-the-fact rationalisation.

The TARDIS was police-box shaped in pitches and synopses prior to An Unearthly Child. It is sometimes said that Sydney Newman proposed that it should be night watchman's tent; but in fact, he gave that as an example of one of thing it definitely shouldn't be. But there is a persistent oral tradition that the author of the first story was the person who proposed the Police Box shape.

SMOKING
When Ian loses his torch, he says that he doesn't have any matches, which suggests that, unusually for the time, he is a non-smoker. ("I haven't got any" rather than "I just used my last".) The Doctor, smokes a big pipe, which may be why he keeps coughing.

Ian's lack of matches may be intended to foreshadow the storyline about the cave people who have forgotten how to make fire. 

76 TOTTERS LANE
The word "totter" can mean to stumble or collapse: however Totter is also an old English word for a trader; we still talk about "totting up" the days takings. There is an area of Bristol called Totterdown.

'76 was the year of the American revolution; Barbara of course gives Susan a book about the French Revolution of '89.

There is a real Totters Lane near Guildford and Basingstoke in Surrey.

If the Doctor wants to keep his existence secret, why has he allowed the school secretary to know the real address of the place he has hidden the TARDIS?