Timeless Adventures (4 page)

It’s possible that those within the BBC concerned with the development of
Doctor Who
had at the backs of their minds (perhaps after an early-1960s TV transmission) the little-remembered Gainsborough comedy
Time Flies
from 1944. Writers Phil Norman and Chris Diamond suggested in
TV Cream’s Anatomy of Cinema
that actor Felix Aylmer might count as the first incarnation of the Doctor, as in
Time Flies
he plays an old scientist who’s invented a time-space machine that takes the form of a large silver sphere that seems to be bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside. The movie sees comedian Tommy Handley joining Aylmer, Evelyn Dall as showgirl Susie and George Moon as her husband Bill in a trip back in time to the Elizabethan era, where the gimmick of giving Shakespeare (John Salew) the ideas for his plays appears (as replayed in the
Doctor Who
adventure
The Shakespeare Code
in 2007). Aylmer’s Professor even bears a more than passing resemblance to William Hartnell’s TV and Peter Cushing’s 1960s movie version of the Doctor in dress and mannerisms. There are other curiosities: the ship is launched by accident, the crew (a ‘scientist’ and his three companions) are rendered unconscious upon take-off and mention is made of possibly meeting primitive man at their new location – all strongly echoed in
Doctor Who
’s eventual first episode. The adventurers encounter Queen Elizabeth and Raleigh (the Queen appears in
Doctor Who
in a Hartnell-starring episode of
The Chase
entitled ‘The Executioners’ as well as in
The Shakespeare
Code
), as well as Shakespeare (also in ‘The Executioners’ and, of course,
The Shakespeare Code
). The scientist’s side-kicks are described as his ‘companions’, while Handley’s antics could be compared to those of the Meddling Monk, a mischievous character met by Hartnell’s Doctor in
The Time Meddler
. The film even climaxes with a hunt for a missing element (platinum) needed to make the ship work and effect their escape, a plot point repeated in Hartnell’s second serial,
The Daleks
, with mercury instead of platinum. The coincidences are certainly curious, to say the least.

The fact that the Doctor’s human companions were to be two schoolteachers and a pupil was no accident. As well as being an exciting adventure serial, Newman wanted the new show to be broadly educational (living up to the promise of the BBC Charter to ‘inform, educate and entertain’), to use the Doctor’s travels through time and space to bring the facts of history and cosmology to an attentive audience, disguised as entertainment. For the young, radical, commercially driven newcomer to the Corporation, this was a very traditional, almost Reithian concept but he also saw it as a function of good, literary science fiction. In further revisions to the series’ format document, teenager Biddy became Sue and was working class (seen as a ‘good thing’ in 1960s drama), while Cliff was a science teacher and Lola a history teacher, encompassing the two disciplines that might be useful in uncontrolled travels through time and space. Storylines were by now being devised for the character’s adventures. An initial outline in which the travellers were to be reduced to miniature size and trapped in Cliff’s school lab was rejected by Newman as ‘thin on incident and character’. Writer Anthony Coburn was set to work by acting producer Rex Tucker on a second adventure that would take the central characters back to prehistoric times where they would meet a clan of cavemen, as alluded to in
Time Flies
.

In June 1963,
Doctor Who
’s first permanent producer arrived at BBC Television Centre to take up her post. Verity Lambert, then just 28 years old, had been selected by Sydney Newman for the still-vacant producer post. Newman’s initial choice for the job had been Don Taylor, a BBC staff director associated with provocative single plays and the work of radical writer David Mercer. Taylor had been upset by the arrival of Newman at the BBC, believing Newman’s commercial, populist approach to drama conflicted with his own conception of the BBC as the National Theatre of the airways. When Taylor passed on the new Saturday teatime series, Newman had suggested to Shaun Sutton, then best known for his children’s drama serials (which Newman thought old-fashioned), that he take on
Doctor Who
. Sutton, too, passed. Newman then recalled Lambert, a production assistant who’d impressed him at
Armchair Theatre
on ABC.

‘When Donald Wilson and I discussed who might take over the responsibility for producing the show I rejected the traditional drama types who did children’s serials,’ said Newman of his approach, ‘and said that I wanted somebody who’d be prepared to break rules in doing the show. Somebody young with a sense of “today” – the early “Swinging London” days.’

Newman was essentially looking for someone in his own image, rather than someone trained in the ‘old-fashioned’ ways of the BBC. Although Lambert’s experience was limited, Newman felt that enthusiasm and independence were more important to the task of running
Doctor Who
than familiarity with the inner workings of the BBC. ‘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,’ Newman stated. ‘I introduced her to Donald Wilson and I don’t think he quite liked her at first. She was too good looking, too smart alecky and too commercial-television minded. I knew they would hit it off when they got to know one another better. They did.’

Lambert had split her time at ABC with a year working on television in New York, an experience that had broadened her horizons and her experience. She arrived at the BBC to find there was little to the
Doctor Who
project other than the ever-evolving format document and a host of growing technical objections from the BBC facilities managers at the tiny and antiquated studios at Lime Grove. Lambert found she had to work closely with the series’ associate producer Mervyn Pinfield, who’d been appointed to handle the technical side of what was proving to be an ambitious project. Lambert also met with director Waris Hussein, a young newcomer to the BBC like herself, who’d been attached to direct the planned second serial about the show’s characters meeting ancient cavemen.

Most of the technical objections centred on the first storyline, which involved the main characters being shrunk to minuscule size, something those at Lime Grove believed was beyond the capability of the technical facilities available. Finally, the decision was taken to shelve the ‘Giants’ storyline and pull the caveman tale forward to form the first story of the series. Lambert and the team agreed that it would be sensible to postpone production by a few weeks to give them all time to get to grips with the complicated, technically challenging show. The core
Doctor Who
production team was completed with the arrival of script editor David Whitaker at the end of June 1963.

Scripts became the first priority, as without those basic blueprints no television drama could ever enter production. Anthony Coburn delivered his draft caveman adventure scripts, which contained some important changes. The male schoolteacher was now called Ian Chesterton, while the teen female character had become Susan Foreman. With two of the scripts for the first four-episode story delivered, scenic-design work could begin in earnest, a step especially necessary as the first episode introduced the Doctor’s time-space machine, something that promised to be a major design challenge for BBC technicians more used to contemporary or period dramas.

Lambert and Whitaker were not entirely happy with Coburn’s work on the opening adventure and, following the delivery of his third of four episodes, they requested that he embark on a major re-write. In the meantime, Lambert turned her attention to casting the ongoing central roles for the series. Her first task was to find the right actor to take on the leading role of the mysterious Doctor. Lambert may have been new to creative responsibility but she knew enough to be aware that the success or failure of a TV show often revolved around the leading actors. She had to find the right man to inhabit the role of the Doctor.

In conjunction with Waris Hussein, now set to direct the first story of the new series, based on Coburn’s caveman scripts, Lambert drew up a shortlist of suitable stars. On the list were renowned thespian Cyril Cusack and Leslie French (who had apparently been the nude model for the statue of Ariel on the facade of the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London and later appeared in a 1988
Doctor Who
story,
Silver Nemesis
). Eventually, Lambert auditioned 55-year-old William Hartnell, based on a viewing of the Lindsay Anderson film
This Sporting
Life
(1963), although he was best known to TV viewers for his role as the irascible military man in Granada’s comedy series
The Army Game
(1957–61). Hartnell had often been typecast as tough guys or criminals, but
This Sporting Life
had allowed him to show a broader range, something he was intent on developing further. While his agent was reluctant to connect Hartnell with what was being perceived as a children’s show, the actor himself was keen to break out of the typecasting that had been afflicting him and readily attended a meeting with Lambert and Hussein. Enthused by the project, he agreed to take on the lead role of the Doctor.

That major hurdle overcome, Lambert and Hussein quickly cast the remaining central roles. Science teacher Ian Chesterton was to be played by Russell Enoch, who performed under the stage name William Russell, and was well known to ITV viewers as the lead in
The Adventures of William Tell
. Jacqueline Hill became history teacher Barbara Wright following a meeting at a party attended by Lambert and her old friend, the director Alvin Rakoff, Hill’s husband. The role of Susan, now the granddaughter of the mysterious Doctor, was a little harder to fill. Several actresses were auditioned (including Jackie Lane, later to play companion Dodo), but none were deemed suitable. According to longstanding legend, Hussein spotted a likely looking girl on a studio monitor at Television Centre, and soon 23-year-old Carole Ann Ford was signed as Susan Foreman.

With the cast in place, Coburn’s revised scripts arrived in July 1963 and were much more to Lambert and Whitaker’s liking, with characters having been strengthened, the cavemen given proper dialogue (the first drafts contained only grunts) and the backgrounds for the Doctor and Susan deftly sketched out in only a few lines of dialogue.

The first scripts for the show displayed the series’ scientific and educational remit clearly. The two teachers would be the means by which the series could impart information or lessons in science and history and, while she now had an otherworldly background as the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan was clearly an audience-identification figure for younger viewers. She’s even into then-contemporary early-1960s rock ‘n’ roll (fictional group John Smith and the Common Men, rapidly rising up the pop charts, play on her ‘transistor’ radio). These three characters would provide templates for the majority of the Doctor’s travelling companions across the next 45 years, with their roles and functions within the drama evolving to reflect the times in which the programmes were made (spanning five different decades), but always staying the same at the most basic ‘character function’ level.

The new cast, along with the series’ production crew, found themselves facing a series of technical challenges in getting the show made. The concerns initially raised by service departments (scenery, costume, make-up, lighting) about the limitations of shooting the new series at the antiquated Lime Grove studios continued to grow as preparations were made to record the first episode of
Doctor Who
. Those who ran the BBC technical departments that would have to provide set designs, build scenery, create costumes and produce special effects felt the proposed show was simply too ambitious given the budget of just over £2,000 per 25-minute episode. Sydney Newman probably saw their objections as symptomatic of the hidebound nature of the BBC, where embedded interests often didn’t like to be challenged. Despite that, it was true that Studio D at Lime Grove, an old film studio bought by the BBC prior to the creation of Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush, was unlikely to make the production of
Doctor Who
easy. The huge technical challenges of mounting the series would be one of the next obstacles to face neophyte producer Verity Lambert.

Along with the technical problems came increasing doubts among the senior managers at the BBC about the wisdom of scheduling this seemingly unconventional new show to run for 52 weeks of the year (as was the plan at this early pre-transmission stage). With episodes recorded only three to four weeks prior to transmission, the launch date of the show had already been postponed several times, from July 1963 to an eventual November debut, by which time the perepisode budget had risen to nearer £4,000, due to the one-off costs of building the interior of the Doctor’s time-space ship. BBC internal memos from the period reveal that Assistant Controller of Television Joanna Spicer had objected to the new series’ apparent failure to go through the usual BBC approvals processes, while even Donald Baverstock was finding it difficult to justify the cost of the show in his overall annual planning. He instructed Donald Wilson and Lambert not to develop any material beyond four initial episodes, while a proposed
Radio Times
front cover promoting the first episode was abandoned, according to Newman due to ‘lack of confidence in the programme at Controller level’.

In the middle of all this seeming chaos, Lambert was struggling to develop future scripts and ensure that the resources were available to support the show, as well as making sure that any technical challenges were overcome and that the cast were comfortable with their roles. It was a tall order and would have tested the most experienced television producer. Even in 1963, however, television was a young medium, one in which imaginative and motivated people could make a big splash. Something that allowed Lambert to chart her own course with
Doctor Who
was the fact that the BBC had never made anything like it before, so there was no ‘right’ way to do a weekly science-fiction-fantasy series in the UK.