Episode: 4220
Title: HPR4220: How Doctor Who Began
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4220/hpr4220.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:35:25

---

This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,220 for Friday the 4th of October 2024.
Today's show is entitled, How Doctor Who Began?
It is hosted by Ahuka and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is a look at the very first serial of Doctor Who.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode
in our new series on science fiction and fantasy and I'm going to continue now with talking
about Doctor Who and I'm going to take a look at how the show actually got started way
back in 1963 because I think it's interesting to look at how a BBC science fiction show
would last 60 years and it's still going on and you know how did it all get started.
Now you can find more detailed explanations, you know, if you wanted to get into it but you know
this will be the kind of the overview of how this got going.
And it starts with a fellow named Sidney Newman who had come to England to work at ABC Weekend Television,
one of the independent channels in England.
Now while he was there he created a fantastic spy fiction series called The Avengers,
which I hope many of you have heard of, it's fantastic show.
This is still one of my favorites.
I have a box set of the series when Diana Rigg was part of the cast.
Now I think that loan would be enough to make his reputation.
But then he was lured to the BBC where he became the head of drama.
And it is at the BBC that he had the idea for Doctor Who.
Now he says he had always been a science fiction fan and that when he got to the BBC he was determined to shake things up.
When he was approached by BBC Management to fill a hole in the schedule he thought a science fiction show would be the way to go.
He had a couple of initial ideas to kick it off.
One was that there would be a time machine that is bigger on the inside than the outside.
And that it would star a mysterious character known only as the Doctor.
And that is in fact the only name he goes by.
We know from a later New Who story called The Silence in the Library that he must have revealed his name at least once to River Song.
And later we learned that in fact he had married her but now is not the time to get into that tangled storyline.
And it believed he was very tangled.
So Doctor Who is not the name of a character is the name of a show and it is intended to be read as a question.
In the very first episode Ian refers to him as Doctor Foreman since the Tartus is standing in Mr. Foreman's junkyard and the Doctor replies Doctor Who?
Because he is not named Foreman at all.
So Sydney Newman had a great idea but when he took it to the BBC none of their established producers wanted to take it on.
After all it was a science fiction show aimed at children and not anything prestigious.
So Newman tapped a production assistant from his days at ABC Weekend Television, a young lady named Verity Lambert.
Now she had never produced written or directed previously but agreed to take on the production of this new show.
Now this comes up in the new who story human nature.
When the Doctor who had gone into deep disguise as a human said that his parents were named Sydney and Verity.
In any case it was an inspired choice although she was the first female producer at the BBC as well as the youngest.
She made the show a success and went on to a very successful career as a film and television producer.
Now Sydney Newman was interviewed in an interview that appeared in the 22nd December 1993 edition of Doctor Who magazine.
And he said I think the best thing I ever did on that was to find Verity Lambert.
I remembered Verity as being bright and to use the phrase full of piss and vinegar.
She was gutsy and she used to fight and argue with me even though she was not at a very high level as a production assistant.
Well Lambert had a number of decisions to make.
First she hired Waris Hussein to direct the original story.
Then she needed to cast the show and the most important role was of course the Doctor.
For this she picked William Hartnell, a 55 year old British actor known chiefly for playing military roles in TV and movies.
So the role of the Doctor was quite a change for him.
He was uncertain about it but Lambert and Hussein convinced him.
And he came to love the role and how he went from being a heavy in his previous roles to becoming a beloved grandfather figure.
Then the Doctor needed companions.
A young lady named Carol Anne Ford was cast to play his granddaughter Susan.
Susan was a teenager in the show though Carol Anne Ford was in fact 23 years old, married and had a child.
But she looked quite young.
So she played the role of Susan.
And Susan was enrolled in the Cole Hill school and took the last name for men from the junkyard where the Tartus was staying.
She had two teachers there that featured in the show.
One was Barbara Wright who was played by the actress Jacqueline Hill.
And Barbara Wright was a history teacher.
The other was Ian Chesterton who was played by the actor William Russell.
And Ian Chesterton was a science teacher.
Now these were not accidental choices. The show was started on the premise that they would feature both historical dramas and science fiction dramas.
So they picked people who could be used to provide additional insight into the situations.
Now in 2013, for the 50th anniversary of the show, they created a docu-drama that looked at how all of this came together.
And it's very good. It's called an adventure in space and time.
And one of the things I find interesting is that an actor named Sasha Dewan, who would end up playing the master opposite Jody Whitaker's doctor, was cast in this as Waris Hussein, who was the first director of Doctor Who.
So the adventure in space and time really tells you the whole story of this, really how the very first story came together.
You know, it nearly didn't. They filmed a pilot and it wasn't quite right. Sydney Newman didn't like it.
And you would normally expect that to be the end of it. They would just write off the investment and move on to something else.
But Newman did the unexpected. He gave them his critique and then told them to go back and redo it. They did.
And on November 23rd, 1963, the first episode, an unearthly child, was broadcast.
Now if that date gave you a momentary pause, that is because it was one day after US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Hardly the best time to debut a new show and grab an audience.
But the BBC rebroadcast at the following week, right before the second episode called The Cave of Skulls, which is part of the story, 100,000 BC.
Now the unearthly child of the first episode is Susan Foreman.
And as I mentioned, she took the name form and from the owner of the junkyard that Tartus was in.
And we don't know anything else about her name. She's a student at the Colhill School.
Now, in Doctor Who, you will see the Colhill School pop up again.
And not just in Doctor Who, but in some of the spin-offs.
So that's something that you can, if you're a fan, you watch out for things like that.
And we mention the two teachers and they find her very strange.
She seems to be unaware of things that other teenagers would be expected to know.
And then claims to have knowledge of things that would seem impossible.
For instance, in her history class, she's reading about the French Revolution and then says,
the history book is wrong. It didn't happen that way at all.
So the teachers find her very puzzling and decide they want to investigate.
So they follow her back to her home when she leaves school.
They track her to the junkyard of I.M. Foreman and go inside where they find a blue police call box,
which is not what one normally finds in a junkyard.
As they observe, they see an older man, and when they confront him, he is somewhat hostile.
Eventually, they force their way into the call box and discover that it is much larger inside than it could possibly be.
Susan explains to the older man, who she calls grandfather, that these two are teachers of her.
Eventually, this man says that he is called the doctor, and he locks the doors and takes off.
Then the Tartus lands, and we see it kind of a desert landscape where an ominous shadow of a man appears, and then the episode is over.
Now, characteristic of the classic Doctor Who is that it was broadcast as a serial.
The first story is composed of four episodes of 25 minutes each, and what we just outlined was episode one.
You wanted people to keep coming back each week, so you would end each episode with a cliffhanger, so that they would come back to see how it played out the following week.
And often they would put a cliffhanger at the end of a completed story to get people to come back for the next story.
Sometimes the cliffhanger was the doctor being in danger, and you had to know that he would get out of it somehow, but you'd still want to know how he did it.
Well, if you came back the following week, you would have discovered several things.
The first is that the doctor is upset to see that the Tartus still looks like a police call box.
Apparently, it is supposed to blend in with its surroundings, and while a police call box blends in nicely in 1963, London, it is out of place wherever it is they are.
It turns out the Tartus is supposed to have something called a chameleon circuit, but on this Tartus it is broken, and it has stayed broken through all 60 years of the program.
By now it's a trademark, it's famous, but all along it had the useful characteristic of allowing them to reuse the prop without spending more money.
And believe me, the budgets were minuscule when this program started.
It's amazing how much they were able to do on next to no money.
So they've stepped out of the Tartus doctor says, oh, something's wrong, it's not supposed to still be a police call box.
And then they get captured by cavemen and dragged back to the cave they all inhabit called the cave of skulls.
And part of the reason for this was that when they stepped out of the Tartus, the doctor had been seen lighting a pipe, and the cavemen are all desperate to discover the secret of making fire.
Now, I would have to say that by 100,000 BC people knew how to make fire. In fact, the date of 1 million BC seems more accurate, but let's not nitpick.
Over the next three episodes, the doctor and his companions managed to avoid being killed and eventually making escape.
One notable incident is during the escape when the doctor attempts to kill one of the cavemen and is stopped by Ian.
Now, this is notable because the doctor generally avoids doing things like that as the show went on through the years.
I think at this point, people were still figuring out who the doctor would really be, and it hadn't quite jailed yet.
So that was the first story, the four-parter, that kicked off the whole thing.
I'm going to continue for a little bit longer before switching to other topics, but we'll pick up the pace a little bit.
I went into a lot of detail on this. We're not going to do one story per episode of Hacker Public Radio. That would bore everyone to tears, I'm sure.
Now, I do want to look more at the first doctor, William Hartnell, and his stories, but now that we've got all the basics in place, and we understand the premise, I think I can cover them a little bit more briefly now.
So, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and is always encouraging you to support Free Software. Bye-bye!
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio, and Hacker Public Radio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the Internet Archive, and our sings.net.
On this otherwise stated, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution, 4.0 International License.
