Doctor Who (2 page)

1

Building the Show

“It wasn't just a children's show, even though it started as a children's show. It always had another dimension to it.”

—Barry Letts,
Doctor Who
producer 1967–1974

 

 

In 2007, the modern
Doctor Who
broadcast an episode called “Human Nature,” written by Paul Cornell and adapted from his Seventh Doctor novel of the same title, published in 1995. In it, our alien hero, played at the time by David Tennant, decides to hide from certain enemies by taking on a new identity. Using technology called a chameleon arch, he biologically shifts his DNA and brain from that of a Gallifreyan to an Earth-born human, his memories replaced with a fictional life of growing up in Europe. In this new incarnation, when asked about his childhood, he says that his parents were named Sydney and Verity. Certain fans smiled at the mention of these names, referencing the two people who brought what became the
Doctor Who
franchise to life.

The initial creative force behind
The Avengers
and
Doctor Who,
described as “quintessentially British,” Sydney Newman was not in fact from the UK. He was born in Toronto, Canada. In 1938, when nineteen years old, Newman almost took a position with Walt Disney, but couldn't secure a work permit. Instead he took a job at the National Film Board of Canada as a film editor, going on to a career as a film and television producer, eventually becoming supervisor of drama productions for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1954. Journalist Paul Rutherford once said that Newman's work at the CBC marked him as a “great champion of both realistic and Canadian drama.”

By 1958, Newman's work caught the attention of the Associated British Corporation, franchise holder of ITV, a new network and the BBC's rival. ABC offered Newman a position as producer, and he moved to England. Quickly disillusioned, he found much of the network's programming took an unfair
view of the working middle class and focused on stories that appealed to the upper class. Nevertheless, he headed the successful new program
The Avengers
and produced the anthology programs
Armchair Theatre
and
The Wednesday Play,
work that many considered groundbreaking. During this time, Newman met Verity Lambert.

Initially hired as a shorthand typist at ABC, Lambert had moved her way up to production secretary before working under Newman in
Armchair Theatre.
She proved just how capable she could be on November 30, 1958, when an actor died during the live broadcast of the drama
Underground.
Director Ted Kotcheff went to the studio floor to deal with the situation, leaving Lambert to direct the cameras of
Armchair Theatre.
Newman later said of Lambert: “She had never directed, produced, acted, or written drama—but, by God, she was a bright, highly intelligent, outspoken production secretary who took no nonsense and never gave any—but all with winning charm.”

Lambert left ABC in 1961 to work as personal assistant to producer David Susskind in New York. She later rejoined ABC but as a production assistant, despite her experience. She decided to leave the industry altogether if she didn't see signs of advancement in a year.

Meanwhile, after some negotiation, the BBC offered Newman the position of head of drama. He began in December 1962 and hoped to shake things up. In a 1984 interview, he said, “The BBC drama was still catering to a highly educated, cultured class rather than the mass audience which was not aware of ‘culture' as such and had no real background. But above all, I felt that the dramas weren't really speaking about common everyday things.” Newman's new approach to drama at the BBC ensured that he and Lambert would cross paths again soon.

A New Family Program

Soon after joining the BBC, Newman absorbed the duties of the Children's Department into the greater Drama Department, then divided the work of Drama into Plays, Series, and Serials departments. In early 1963, he attended a meeting concerning the Saturday evening schedule.
Grand National Grandstand,
a popular sports program, usually ended by 5:15
p.m., followed by half-hour classic literary adaptations for children, then
Juke Box Jury
at 5:45, a music panel program popular with teens. Ratings showed that viewership dropped dramatically after
Grandstand
and didn't pick up again until
Juke Box Jury,
so the BBC sought a new “Saturday teatime program” to keep people watching during the half hour in between.

By his own admission to colleagues, Newman cared little for classic literature anyway, preferring science fiction books, so he decided on a science fiction program featuring heroic figures. He once famously stated: “I love them [science fiction stories] because they're a marvelous way—and a safe way, I might add—of saying nasty things about our own society.” Newman envisioned a show with a broad premise adaptable to practically any kind of story. As many later remarked, he wanted to follow the old BBC adage that broadcast programming was meant “to inform, educate, and entertain.”

Newman told Donald Wilson, head of serials and a respected filmmaker, to put together an outline for this program, lasting fifty-two weeks and divided into several multi-episode stories with cliffhanger endings. To develop the idea, Wilson brought in John Braybon and Alice Frick, both of whom had done a report the previous year regarding possible new BBC science fiction programming. They had concluded that original stories would fare better than adaptations of existing literature and that stories involving time travel and telepaths could prove popular. Rounding out the story meeting, Wilson also brought in C. E. Webber, who had written many successful BBC adaptations.

Ten years earlier, the BBC had premiered
The Quartermass Experiment,
featuring Bernard Quartermass of the British Experimental Rocket Group, portrayed by actor Reginald Tate. The year 1955 saw the broadcast of a sequel series,
Quartermass II,
followed by a third TV series entitled
Quartermass and the Pit
in 1959. There were also two film adaptations during the 1950s. The success was something that Wilson's group wanted to emulate. Following the Quartermass serials, the BBC had broadcast
A for Andromeda
in 1961, in which a group of scientists receive alien instructions to build an intelligent computer, which then in turn creates a life form named Andromeda. The show spawned a sequel series in 1962 entitled
The Andromeda Breakthrough.

While the Quartermass and Andromeda serials relied heavily on contact with aliens, Wilson suggested this new program revolve around a time machine, discussing Poul Anderson's recent
Guardians of Time
collection. He also preemptively prohibited the inclusion of another all-knowing computer. Alice Frick argued that it might be “more modern” to have the heroes travel in a flying saucer rather than a time machine. Braybon thought the program should be set in Earth's future and that the cast be “scientific troubleshooters, established to keep scientific experiments under control for political or humanistic reasons.”

Webber put together the basic pitch. He dismissed children as main characters, believing that kids didn't care for protagonists younger than themselves. He proposed a cast of three:

 

THE HANDSOME YOUNG MAN HERO

(First character)

A young heroine does not command the full interest of older women; our young hero has already got the boys and girls; therefore we can consider the older woman by providing:—

 

THE HANDSOME WELL-DRESSED HEROINE AGED ABOUT 30

(Second character)

Men are believed to form an important part of the 5 o'clock Saturday (post-
Grandstand
) audience. They will be interested in the young hero; and to catch them firmly we should add:—

 

THE MATURE MAN, 35–40, WITH SOME “CHARACTER” TWIST

(Third character)

Nowadays, to satisfy grown women, Father-Figures are introduced into loyalty programmes at such a rate that TV begins to look like an Old People's Home; let us introduce them ad hoc, as our stories call for them.

 

Webber then detailed a base for the troubleshooters, consisting of a small lab and a comfortable office/living area that “would not have been out of place in Holmes' Baker Street.” Each of the three would be a
specialist in a different field, and “if the two men sometimes become pure scientist and forget, the woman always reminds them that, finally, they are dealing with human beings.”

Webber evidently didn't think much of the dramatic impact of science fiction (“S.F.”) stories in general, as evidenced by his final notes in the document:

 

a. S.F. deliberately avoids character-in-depth. In S.F. the characters are almost interchangeable. We must use fully conceived characters.

 

b. S.F. is deliberately unsexual; women are not really necessary to it. We must add feminine interest as a consequence of creating real characters.

 

c. Because of the above conditions, S.F. does not consider moral conflict. It has one clear overall meaning: that human beings in general are incapable of controlling the forces they set free.

 

In April 1963, Sydney Newman looked over Webber's pitch and opposed all three main characters being experts, believing dialogue between them wouldn't naturally explain science fiction plot elements in a way that children would easily understand. Newman also wanted a teenage girl in the show, someone to get into trouble in ways the adults didn't.

Newman then focused on developing the mature man character, making him a “senile old man” of 720 to 760 years of age, an alien scientist who had escaped from a distant planet in a spaceship that he wasn't sure how to operate. This (possibly stolen) spaceship was also a time machine and would serve as headquarters for the main characters. Newman later suggested that this time ship be bigger on the inside. As Donald Wilson included these notes into what was still called the “Saturday evening serial,” Newman settled on the title of
Dr. Who,
intending that the opening story would feature the old man wandering in a foggy street, amnesiac and only calling himself “the Doctor.” The other characters would ask “Doctor Who?” and it would become the old man's alias, as he didn't recall his real name.

Dr. Who

C. E. Webber wrote a new pitch for the newly titled
Dr. Who
program. Here is how he described the new, slightly larger cast of characters:

 

BRIDGET (BIDDY)

A with-it girl of 15, reaching the end of her Secondary School career, eager for life, lower-than-middle class. Avoid dialect, use neutral accent laced with latest teenage slang.

 

MISS McGOVERN (LOLA)

24. Mistress at Biddy's school. Timid but capable of sudden rabbit courage. Modest, with plenty of normal desires. Although she tends to be the one who gets into trouble, she is not to be guyed: she also is a loyalty character.

 

CLIFF

27 or 28. Master at the same school. Might be classed as ancient by teenagers except that he is physically perfect, strong and courageous, a gorgeous dish. Oddly, when brains are required, he can even be brainy, in a diffident sort of way.

 

To justify Cliff performing impressive feats in the stories, a handwritten note from Sydney Newman here reads: “Top of his class in the parallel bars.” Webber's pitch continues:

 

These are the characters we know and sympathise with, the ordinary people to whom extraordinary things happen. The fourth basic character remains always something of a mystery, and is seen by us rather through the eyes of the other three. . . .

 

DR. WHO

A frail old man lost in space and time. They give him this name because they don't know who he is. He seems not to remember where he has come from; he is suspicious and capable of sudden
malignance; he seems to have some undefined enemy; he is searching for something as well as fleeing from something. He has a “machine” which enables them to travel together through time, through space, and through matter.

 

The pitch document suggests that Dr. Who, an experienced time traveler, already has influenced many myths and fairy tales on Earth. One section reads: “Was it by means of Dr. Who's machine that Aladdin's palace sailed through the air? Was Merlin Dr. Who? Was Cinderella's Godmother Dr. Who's wife chasing him through time? Jacob Marley was Dr. Who slightly tipsy, but what other tricks did he get up to that Yuletide?” Later on, the pitch describes how this traveler is the crux of the show.

 

He remains a mystery. From time to time the other three discover things about him, which turn out to be false or inconclusive (i.e. any writer inventing an interesting explanation must undercut it within his own serial-time, so that others can have a go at the mystery). They think he may be a criminal fleeing from his own time; he evidently fears pursuit through time. Sometimes they doubt his loss of memory, particularly as he does have flashes of memory. But also, he is searching for something which he desires heart-and-soul, but which he can't define. If, for instance, they were to go back to King Arthur's time, Dr. Who would be immensely moved by the idea of the quest for the Grail. This is, as regards him, a Quest Story, a Mystery Story, and a Mysterious Stranger Story, overall.

 

While his mystery may never be solved, or may perhaps be revealed slowly over a very long run of stories, writers will probably like to know an answer. Shall we say:—

 

The Secret of Dr. Who: In his own day, somewhere in our future, he decided to search for a time or for a society or for a physical condition which is ideal, and having found it, to stay there. He stole the machine and set forth on his quest. He is thus an
extension of the scientist who has opted out, but he has opted farther than ours can do, at the moment. And having opted out, he is disintegrating.