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pmcrayFor those people watching the doubleheader on 30 November 1963, Doctor Who has turned out not to be a mystery story about a retired (or possibly defrocked) vaudeville magician now hanging out with his granddaughter and some of his old props in a junkyard in the London of 1963. Instead, the old man and his granddaughter are alien exiles from their planet, wanderers in the fourth dimension. And now we appear to be in the Stone Age, or at least a Stone Age. As Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles point out in About Time 1, we don't actually know that we are in Earth's Stone Age or even whether we are on Earth: we could be in a post-apocalypse future or on a lost colony or the Stone Age of another planet of humanoids (we will visit exactly those kinds of places in adventures to come after all). This might explain why we don't get any mammoths, much less dinosaurs, even if Raquel Welch in Hammer's 1 Million Years B.C. is still three years in the future (although the original 1940 film might have been known to the viewers and producers). As to whether it is a good thing that we don't see any mammoths or dinosaurs, we might consider the likely quality of the effects given DW's budget.
What we do get though is pretty much the prototype DW story: the Doctor and his companions find themselves in some exotic and isolated environment, quickly come into contact with a local society, usually with an urgent need for some problem to be solved and often in conflict with some other local society. The Doctor and/or (some of) his companions get captured, escape (get captured, escape) before eventually solving the urgent problem and resolving the conflict between the two societies (for various values of "resolve"). Thus here the tribe of Gum have lost the secret of making fire (or rather Za, ostensible leader of the tribe, has lost the knack that he learnt from his father, "the Great Firemaker") and there is an interpolator, Kal, from another (possibly now extinct) tribe, who is trying to usurp Za's position. (And, frankly, if it hasn't worked by now, Za, just carrying on rubbing probably isn't going to do much good.)
All this feels simultaneously like and not like the Who we know. "Not like" partly because, of course, no-one knows they are in Doctor Who yet (least of all the crowd of RADA-graduate types playing the cave people), partly because it's hard to believe now that the Doctor doesn't just solve the tribe's problem with a quick demonstration of how to make fire in any one of a number of ways (and surely Ian was in the Boy Scouts or would have learnt to make fire as part of his jungle survival training when he was a Royal Marine commando in Malaya during his National Service, and he is, after all, a science teacher, and, anyway, Barbara may well have been in the Girl Guides), but mostly because the Doctor isn't anything at all like the Doctor we came to know. He's a cantankerous and obstreperous old man, who is only just prevented by Ian from bludgeoning an injured caveman to death with a rock. He pretty much fails to take charge of the situation and engages in his constant petty squabbles with his companions.
We do have to wonder whose idea it was to create a series whose main character is just so damned unpleasant and unsympathetic. At this stage, it's still not obvious that the Doctor isn't going to turn out to be the villain or perhaps an anti-hero (recall that this is the era of Look Back in Anger, the British New Wave - Room at the Top, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life, which, of course, featured Hartnell - that The IPCRESS File was published in 1962 as an antidote to James Bond, and that existentialism is still very much the flavour of the era). We think of DW as a children's programme, yet it was made by the Drama Department and thus had a higher budget that a children's show would have been allocated. DW was aimed at families, but what exactly does that entail? Susan is a teenager and I&B are the solid, handsome, early middle age couple. Who is the Doctor supposed to appeal to? Certainly not 7-year olds and probably not 17-year olds doing A-level French and reading La nausée and La peste in the original. Ian looks, sounds, dresses and behaves like the hero (he was in Sir Lancelot) and yet he still refers and defers to the Doctor as leader of their tribe. One does wonder what people in 1963 made of it.
It's also, to a modern viewer, terribly slow and ponderous. We long for the Doctor just to get on with things. And a decent sabre-tooth tiger would surely have livened up proceedings. The cave people speak English. No explanation is given for this. It's probably better than having them just grunt at the Doctor and his companions. This could be considered a genre convention or part of the grammar of fantasy. Did viewers at the time think it odd? At least the cave people's accents aren't too plummy (see "The Daleks").
Compared though to many of the stories to come, it is all over soon enough. In 1963, people wouldn't have known that the sojourn among the cave people would only be three episodes long and that the adventure wouldn't end with Ian becoming new leader of the tribe of Gum, with Barbara as his consort and the Doctor as shaman/witch doctor/priest and Susan being married off to Kal as part of the peace settlement. "Doctor Who". "Doctor Which". "Witch Doctor". It would have been a perfectly reasonable expectation at the time. This could have been something like John Carter for all anyone at home really knew. Or that we could have ended up back in the junkyard with the revelation that the whole thing had been some kind of Alice-like reverie. Instead the tribe is left to its own devices and end up back in the TARDIS, but it's not Totter's Lane where we find ourselves next...
Now Write On...
Where might we go this in NuWho? We've been back to Totter's Lane a couple of times since, but there might still be more to be done there. What did the Doctor and Susan get up to during their five months in 1963 London? And who exactly is I.M. Foreman?
Prehistoric fiction is a major sub-genre and there is much that can be done with it. In modern Who, of course, we would not probably want to do a straight historical, which means that there has to be some kind of sf plot. That could be time travellers, perhaps tourists, big game hunters hunting mammoths - that's why they went extinct. Bringing aliens in might suggest something along the lines of 2001. What about the Toba Supereruption - with timetravelling aliens? And if we want to have a 1 Million Years B.C.-style hodgepodge, it can turn out either to a VR simulation or a mental projection or a zoo on an alien planet. Humh. There probably is something unexpected you could do along those kinds of lines.
What we do get though is pretty much the prototype DW story: the Doctor and his companions find themselves in some exotic and isolated environment, quickly come into contact with a local society, usually with an urgent need for some problem to be solved and often in conflict with some other local society. The Doctor and/or (some of) his companions get captured, escape (get captured, escape) before eventually solving the urgent problem and resolving the conflict between the two societies (for various values of "resolve"). Thus here the tribe of Gum have lost the secret of making fire (or rather Za, ostensible leader of the tribe, has lost the knack that he learnt from his father, "the Great Firemaker") and there is an interpolator, Kal, from another (possibly now extinct) tribe, who is trying to usurp Za's position. (And, frankly, if it hasn't worked by now, Za, just carrying on rubbing probably isn't going to do much good.)
All this feels simultaneously like and not like the Who we know. "Not like" partly because, of course, no-one knows they are in Doctor Who yet (least of all the crowd of RADA-graduate types playing the cave people), partly because it's hard to believe now that the Doctor doesn't just solve the tribe's problem with a quick demonstration of how to make fire in any one of a number of ways (and surely Ian was in the Boy Scouts or would have learnt to make fire as part of his jungle survival training when he was a Royal Marine commando in Malaya during his National Service, and he is, after all, a science teacher, and, anyway, Barbara may well have been in the Girl Guides), but mostly because the Doctor isn't anything at all like the Doctor we came to know. He's a cantankerous and obstreperous old man, who is only just prevented by Ian from bludgeoning an injured caveman to death with a rock. He pretty much fails to take charge of the situation and engages in his constant petty squabbles with his companions.
We do have to wonder whose idea it was to create a series whose main character is just so damned unpleasant and unsympathetic. At this stage, it's still not obvious that the Doctor isn't going to turn out to be the villain or perhaps an anti-hero (recall that this is the era of Look Back in Anger, the British New Wave - Room at the Top, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life, which, of course, featured Hartnell - that The IPCRESS File was published in 1962 as an antidote to James Bond, and that existentialism is still very much the flavour of the era). We think of DW as a children's programme, yet it was made by the Drama Department and thus had a higher budget that a children's show would have been allocated. DW was aimed at families, but what exactly does that entail? Susan is a teenager and I&B are the solid, handsome, early middle age couple. Who is the Doctor supposed to appeal to? Certainly not 7-year olds and probably not 17-year olds doing A-level French and reading La nausée and La peste in the original. Ian looks, sounds, dresses and behaves like the hero (he was in Sir Lancelot) and yet he still refers and defers to the Doctor as leader of their tribe. One does wonder what people in 1963 made of it.
It's also, to a modern viewer, terribly slow and ponderous. We long for the Doctor just to get on with things. And a decent sabre-tooth tiger would surely have livened up proceedings. The cave people speak English. No explanation is given for this. It's probably better than having them just grunt at the Doctor and his companions. This could be considered a genre convention or part of the grammar of fantasy. Did viewers at the time think it odd? At least the cave people's accents aren't too plummy (see "The Daleks").
Compared though to many of the stories to come, it is all over soon enough. In 1963, people wouldn't have known that the sojourn among the cave people would only be three episodes long and that the adventure wouldn't end with Ian becoming new leader of the tribe of Gum, with Barbara as his consort and the Doctor as shaman/witch doctor/priest and Susan being married off to Kal as part of the peace settlement. "Doctor Who". "Doctor Which". "Witch Doctor". It would have been a perfectly reasonable expectation at the time. This could have been something like John Carter for all anyone at home really knew. Or that we could have ended up back in the junkyard with the revelation that the whole thing had been some kind of Alice-like reverie. Instead the tribe is left to its own devices and end up back in the TARDIS, but it's not Totter's Lane where we find ourselves next...
Now Write On...
Where might we go this in NuWho? We've been back to Totter's Lane a couple of times since, but there might still be more to be done there. What did the Doctor and Susan get up to during their five months in 1963 London? And who exactly is I.M. Foreman?
Prehistoric fiction is a major sub-genre and there is much that can be done with it. In modern Who, of course, we would not probably want to do a straight historical, which means that there has to be some kind of sf plot. That could be time travellers, perhaps tourists, big game hunters hunting mammoths - that's why they went extinct. Bringing aliens in might suggest something along the lines of 2001. What about the Toba Supereruption - with timetravelling aliens? And if we want to have a 1 Million Years B.C.-style hodgepodge, it can turn out either to a VR simulation or a mental projection or a zoo on an alien planet. Humh. There probably is something unexpected you could do along those kinds of lines.
