Nobody comes to An Unearthly Child cold these days. The only reason anyone knows about it is bound up with what happened next: it launched a series, a series which, barring accidents, ran for the next sixty-one years and counting. Yet one of the pleasures of the opening episode is how easy it is to sink back into the mindset an audience will have had as they watched it back in November 1963. The initial situation, that of two schoolteachers meeting after work to discuss a phenomenally gifted but mysterious student they both teach, is played with absolute conviction. We know full well why the opening shot of the episode features a police telephone box, but there’s still something about the reveal of the TARDIS interior that floors you – not least because this TARDIS interior, with its stark decor and enormous ceiling-mounted light, may still be the most alien look the ship has ever had.
That opening shot, incidentally, travels for almost as long as the ones that impressed so much at the start of later episodes like Warrior’s Gate and The Ghost Monument. It’s technically rougher – 1963 is still over a decade away from the invention of the Steadicam – but there’s a technical daring to it that shows why director Waris Hussein graduated to a film career. It still feels impeccably Doctor Who, which can’t be said for another of the first episode’s storytelling flourishes. That’s no criticism – indeed, part of the reason why it’s so easy to fool yourself into thinking the first episode is just a realist drama about teachers is because Ian and Barbara’s flashbacks are so different to any storytelling mode the series would explore until the revival. When Virgin Books launched the New Adventures they promised adventures “too broad and too deep for the small screen”, but there was one convention of the series they stuck religiously to: there would be no getting inside the Doctor’s head. He was too mysterious for a first-person monologue. Similarly, the show can have its lead character narrate a memory of theirs so long as said lead character is a London schoolteacher. When the Doctor enters the story, the rules change.
Actually, when the Doctor enters the story the story changes. For most of the Hartnell era, the episodes had individual titles, rather than being part 1, part 2 etc. of an overarching story. As such, there’s been a bit of debate over the years over what the earliest serials are actually called. Most of the time it’s been settled with reference to production documents, and on the occasions when that law has been overruled it’s been overruled on common sense grounds. The first Dalek story was referred to as The Robots, The Mutants and The Dead Planet at various stages of production, but you don’t have to be a genius to understand why we now call it The Daleks. An Unearthly Child is different. It was referred to as 100,000 BC in production documents, with the more familiar title being used solely for the first episode. Despite the first episode being the only one that deals directly with Susan, the titular unearthly child, the title has somehow absorbed the rest of the serial.
This may be down to the common fan opinion that the serial goes wildly downhill as soon as it leaves Totter’s Lane. Granted, a lot of common fan opinions about the Hartnell years are formed by decades of people reading series guides rather than actually watching the (often unavailable) episodes, but that’s not the case this time: Mary Crozier, the Guardian‘s TV reviewer, described the second episode as “a depressing sequel… ludicrous” when it aired. I can’t really disagree with the consensus here; the first episode is a masterpiece, and the latter three test the patience. You can see why, on paper, sending the TARDIS crew from contemporary London to prehistoric Earth seems like the boldest demonstration of what this show can do. It’s just that, having massively expanded British television’s horizons in episode one, the rest of the story falls victim to every pitfall imaginable in dramatising prehistoric life. There may be no way to tell a story about cave people that isn’t silly. The route Hammer would soon clean up with, where they were at least sexy, half-naked, silly cave people, is obviously not available to Doctor Who.
Let’s take it as read that three episodes of cave politics and arguing in Tarzan voices is not as entertaining as unpicking the mystery of Susan. Let’s ask instead: what kind of show is Doctor Who positioning itself as here? The clear answer is an adventure serial, and a very specifically 1960s kind of adventure serial at that. Sometimes when early Doctor Who shocks it’s because some expected ingredient of this era’s adventure fiction is now more taboo: this is most clearly the case with the sexual threat against Barbara in The Keys of Marinus and The Reign of Terror, or the implied rape in The Time Meddler. There’s an awful lot of women-in-peril in old adventure stories, and there’s also often a lot of violence committed by or against animals. An Unearthly Child shows the aftermath of an animal attack in bloody detail that will become increasingly unusual as the series goes on. Certainly a Dalek or a Zarbi’s victim won’t be shown in this fashion; that kind of story is too discomfortingly new in the early ’60s to have what the BBFC call a “genre allowance”.
The next story will obviously redefine what kind of thrills are permissible in Doctor Who entirely, condemning this kind of “pure” historical adventure – i.e., one where the only science-fictional element is the Doctor and the TARDIS – to a slow fade-out. But An Unearthly Child doesn’t quite fit in among the pure historicals either. Original script editor David Whitaker warned writers against historical inaccuracy, singling out the temptation to have some real-world event happen because of the Doctor’s intervention as something he particularly didn’t want to see. (Phew, glad that advice was heeded!) But it’s hard to see how writer Anthony Coburn could have avoided this, given that he’s writing about pre-history. As far as accuracy goes, the best you can say is that no-one can prove Kal, Za and Old Mother didn’t exist. In this way, An Unearthly Child points the way ahead to all those later pseudo-historical stories where the Great Fire of London or the eruption of Pompeii is ascribed to alien intervention – it’s just that this time, the alien intervening is the Doctor.
Why is it always fire that leads Doctor Who writers to posit alien involvement? Maybe it’s a trace memory of this serial. Anthony Coburn wouldn’t write for Doctor Who again, which isn’t unusual in the Hartnell years; a lot of writers were discarded as the show experimented and defined itself. Coburn is, however, the only Doctor Who writer specifically to leave because he wanted to reveal the Doctor and Susan as being Christians, which casts a strange new light not just on his son’s headline-grabbing inanity but on his decision to have the Doctor give the tribe the secret of fire in this story. The serial is at pains to point out that the Doctor isn’t giving humanity as a species fire – the tribe have heard rumours of others mastering it, they just haven’t worked it out themselves. Even so, it casts the Doctor in a Promethean, even Luciferian, role, which is more subversive even than this story’s infamous moments of him contemplating violence or smoking tobacco.
It’s a good show, this, isn’t it? I wonder if it’ll last.
Next up in Doctor Who A-Z: The Daleks (1963-4)
