Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child

Who Un Earth?

Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child
Airdate: 23rd November -
14th December 1963
BBC 1 - Region 1 DVD
Four Episodes

I hadn’t seen the very first Doctor Who serial since it was repeated, when younger viewers such as myself could finally see these older episodes, as part of a five story collection of 18th Anniversary shows called The Five Faces Of Doctor Who (which kinda cheated since the only footage we’d seen as yet of The Fifth Doctor thus far, repeated as part of this season, was the last 20 or so seconds of Tom Baker’s last story). I remember at the time being extremely intrigued by the opening episode of this one but, finding the following three parts somewhat underwhelming. However, I thought I’d revisit the serial again, this time as a DVD, which is a third, bonus disc included in the US Blu Ray edition of An Adventure In Space And Time (which I reviewed here).

Now, I remember the first episode being extraordinarily well written and suspenseful and, sure enough it is. It tells the story of two teachers and ‘about to be companions’ of The Doctor, who are discussing a mysterious and ‘ahead of her time’ student, Susan Foreman. They want to get a handle on her strangeness and, eventually follow her home, to an old junkyard where they end up meeting Susan’s grandfather, The Doctor (after about ten minutes into the first 25 minute installment), get into an argument with him, get alarmed about the inside of the TARDIS being bigger than the outside and, eventually, by the end of the first episode, being pitched back to the days of the cavemen. The following three episodes, while definitely fulfilling the brief to educate kids, shows them embroiled in a power struggle between two violent and ‘would be’ leaders of a tribe, held captive until they can show one or the other how to make fire. Yeah, episodes 2-4 are still pretty much silly shenanigans but, it’s really not as badly written as I remember.

So much for the plot. The actors and script are all superb (in the first episode), however. We have Carole Ann Ford as Susan, playing her as a teenager (although she was in her twenties when she took this role) and in a much different but striking way to the much younger version of her presented in the two movie adaptations. There’s also Jacqueline Hill as history teacher Barbara Wright, who is mostly the scream and act like a damsel person in this first serial but I seem to remember she got much better things to do in later stories.

Then there’s William Russell as science teacher Ian Chesterton, who I always kind of liked and he’s the ‘young man’ member of the cast, presumably to be the one to do any fighting or heavy lifting as required in each story. He later returned to the role as a cameo in Jodie Whittaker’s last story, The Power Of The Doctor (reviewed here by me) in 2022, marking it as the longest gap for a returning actor playing a character in TV history, I believe.

And, of course, we have William Hartnell, who was finally persuaded to join the show and, after a very short while, rather took to it. It’s a very different version of The Doctor than most kids would perhaps accept easily today and, the same can be said of the show as a whole. The nice thing about Hartnell’s portrayal of the role was that he was stubborn, tetchy, antagonistic and, in the early days, you never knew if he was a hero or a villain so much. For instance, in this story, when a caveman has been badly mauled by a beast and his companions, who have all been trying to escape from the victim, stay to help said caveman recover form his wounds... Ian catches The Doctor about to bash the wounded caveman’s head in with a rock because he’s slowing down their retreat back to the TARDIS.

And when I say it’s a very different show... well, for instance, when the caveman is mauled (off screen) by some kind of animal, his torso is absolutely covered in blood. Pretty sure they wouldn’t get away with that in that time slot these days.

There are a few interesting things about the show so let me just quickly point out the obvious ones but, before I do that, I noticed a big continuity problem this time around which I’d never thought of before and so I’ll maybe point that out here (I’m sure I’m not the first to do so). When Barbara lends Susan a book on the history of the French Revolution, once left on her own she begins to read it and mutters to herself... “That’s not right!” Well, all well and good but, bearing in mind she doesn’t actually visit the French Revolution until a 1964 story, later in the same series, one has to wonder how the heck she would know the history books have got it wrong.

The show starts out with the chilling title sequence and Ron Grainer’s catchy theme tune, rendered all the more unearthly, to match the first episode premise, by the uncredited arrangement by the late, great Delia Derbyshire. It must have put fear into the hearts of children everywhere whenever it started each week and it’s still, pretty much, the most effective arrangement of the theme tune (various modern arrangements don’t stand a chance against it).

In the last part of the final episode of the first serial (each series was put together by a number of Doctor Who serials), the episode bleeds into the next story, where the needle on the TARDIS Geiger counter slips into the danger zone, unnoticed by the crew. This is, of course, because they have just landed on the planet Skaro and are about to come face to face with The Doctor’s most famous and popular villains, The Daleks.

Now, about that. Sidney Newman, the show’s producer, tasked Verity Lambert with bringing a science fiction programme which would educate children and families... his big edict was “no bug eyed monsters”. If Lambert hadn’t rebelled against that idea and ran with The Daleks as the follow up story, I believe Doctor Who would not have survived it’s first season. They had some ratings issues for sure. In addition to some of Britain being hit by a power cut the night the first episode aired, it was also the day after the assassination of President John F Kennedy, with news programmes and national trauma (to an extent) overshadowing proceedings. The BBC took the opportunity to repeat the episode again before the second one aired, which picked them up a fair few more viewers but, honestly, the rating were not what they would have liked (although, compared to ratings today for a TV show, the viewer numbers would seem a smash success). Doctor Who was, though, a smash success... but only because Lambert went ahead and ran with a science fiction story featuring the mechanistic, exo-skeletoned Daleks. She realised the gambit had paid off over the next few days when kids in playgrounds and on buses were stretching their arms out and yelling “Exterminate”. Plans were quickly put in place for the Daleks to return the following year and there was also some development considered for a spin-off Dalek television series... which didn’t quite happen but, with various bits of strange news coming out of new co-owners Disney just recently, this still might occur.

And that’s me pretty much done on the opening story. A lot of the mythos surrounding the character of The Doctor is established in these first few episodes... more than you might think. Names and places are not revealed as yet but various pieces of lore built on and expanded over the years have certainly been thought about due to the open ended nature of some of the things said. If you’re a fan of the show and you’ve never seen it before, Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child, is well worth a look... especially the first episode, which sets things in motion. It’s not all that dated and surprisingly well written... maybe give it a go sometime.