A mysterious traveller, an odd police box and an enduring TV classic
Looking back at what made the news in years gone by
NOVEMBER 23, 1963
It began very much as it has continued. Two teachers stumbled across a police telephone box in a London junkyard, and embarked on an adventure through time and space with its mysterious owner.
No one who was watching The Unearthly Child, the first Doctor Who adventure broadcast by the BBC could have imagined that, 58 years later, it would still be going strong.
The teachers, Ian and Barbara played by William Russell and Jacqueline Hill, are concerned about one of their pupils, Susan (Carole Ann Ford), and visit her at home to investigate.
There they come across a police box in a junkyard, but its elderly owner, played by William Hartnell, arrives, and refuses to let them in.
They force their way inside to find Susan in a futuristic control room that is larger than the police box exterior.
Susan explains that the object is a time and space machine called the Tardis and the old man is her grandfather, who reveals that he and his granddaughter are exiles from their own planet. Refusing to let Ian and Barbara leave, he sets the Tardis in flight and ends up in the Stone Age.
The series was conceived to fill a gap in the Saturday schedule, and was intended to appeal to three different age groups – the time slot’s previous children’s audience, adults who had been watching sports programme Grandstand, and teenagers waiting to watch music show, Juke Box Jury.
Head of drama, Sydney Newman, came up with the idea of a time machine larger on the inside than the outside, as well as the central character of the mysterious “Doctor”, and the name Doctor Who.
Meanwhile the Doctor’s travelling companion, a 15-year-old girl, was rewritten as his granddaughter to avoid any possibility of sexual impropriety implicit in having a young girl travelling with an older man. Already, the key ingredients were in place. But there was one last thing to add – the music.
Created in 1963 at the BBC’s pioneering Radiophonic Workshop, the Doctor Who theme music was one of the first electronic music signature tunes for television.
Recorded well before the availability of commercial synthesizers, each note was individually created by cutting, splicing, speeding up and slowing down segments of analogue tape containing recordings of a single plucked string, white noise, and simple harmonic waveforms.
Composer Ron Grainer was amazed at the resulting piece of music and when he heard it, famously asked: “Did I write that?”
The serial received mixed reviews from television
critics with one complaining that the cavemen’s “wigs and furry pelts and clubs were all ludicrous.”
Some 865 episodes have been made, although 97 recordings are missing. The programme originally ran from 1963 to 1989, before being revived in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston in the title role.
Doctor Who has also spawned numerous spin-offs, including comic books, films, novels, audio dramas, and the television series Torchwood (2006-11), The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007-11), K-9 (2009-10), and Class (2016), and has been the subject of countless parodies and references in popular culture.
And over all those years tens of thousands of children – and many adults – have found themselves watching from behind the sofa.