The Doctor steps inside the Tardis for the very first time
An unpromising BBC schedule-filler takes its first strides towards becoming a British cultural institution
Settling down before the television in the early evening of 23 November 1963, few people could have imagined they were about to witness the start of a British cultural institution. Indeed, many were still in shock at the news from across the Atlantic, where, a day earlier, John F Kennedy had been shot dead in Dallas, Texas.
Even as its unearthly title music filled the air, few knew what to expect from Doctor Who. The Radio Times had billed the programme as “an adventure in space and time”, explaining that its heroes might find themselves in “a distant galaxy where civilisation has been devastated by the blast of a neutron bomb or they may find themselves journeying to far Cathay in the caravan of Marco Polo”. Yet most of the first episode was set in a contemporary London secondary school. Indeed, the programme itself had unpromising origins, having been designed as a schedule-filler to follow Grandstand.
Later, the BBC’s audience research report began with the verdict of a “retired naval officer” who described the show as a “cross between Wells’ Time Machine and a space-age Old Curiosity Shop, with a touch of Mack Sennett comedy”. It was, he told the BBC, “in the grand style of the old pre-talkie films to see a dear old police box being hurtled through space and landing on Mars or somewhere. I almost expected to see a batch of Keystone Cops emerge on to the Martian landscape.”