hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4240.txt

Episode: 4240
Title: HPR4240: The First Doctor, Part 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4240/hpr4240.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:54:13

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,240 for Friday the 1st of November 2024.
Today's show is entitled, The First Dr. Park One.
It is part of the series science fiction and fantasy.
It is hosted by Ahu Kahn, and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, a look at the first season of Dr. Hoo.
Hello.
This is Ahu Kahn, 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 looking at the early Dr. Hoo, with taking a look at
the first doctor in the first season.
So last time we went into some detail about the very first episode and how that came to
be and put in some background.
But we're going to pick up the pace a little bit now.
I'm actually going to cover the rest of season one in this episode.
And so the next thing we're going to talk about, the next story we're going to talk about
is called The Dollocks.
Now, the intention of the show's creators was that they would alternate between historical
stories and futuristic science stories.
So following the historical story of the cavemen, they wanted some science fiction.
This ended up being The Dollocks, even though Sidney Newman had said he didn't want any
bug-eyed monsters in the show.
But as it happened, they didn't have another script ready to go.
This happened more frequently than you might imagine in the early days of the show.
The weekly schedule was generally to rehearse the episode Monday through Thursday, videotape
it on Friday and broadcast it on Saturday.
Then the following week, do it again with the next episode.
And they were on a relentless schedule since the first season was comprised of 42 weekly
episodes.
They did not have the luxury of a backlog of scripts that were ready to go, let alone
a chance to get ahead in shooting the shows.
In fact, this was extremely close to live television.
It was videotape the day before it was broadcast, but the idea was that the cameras would
roll without stopping because a stop would just cost more money.
If an actor desperately wanted to stop and redo a scene, the trick they used was to utter
an obscenity because then the director would be forced to stop shooting.
Now the script that was available and ready was called the Dolex and was written by Terri
Nation.
He based the Dolex on the Nazis and their obsession with exterminating other races.
But he had nothing to do with the look of the Dolex.
This was originally going to be done by a designer named Ridley Scott, who went on to be
a famous director.
But when he had a schedule conflict, the job went to Raymond Cusik.
Now the way copyrights worked at this point at the BBC, Terri Nation retained the copyright
to the Dolex and he became very wealthy as a result.
Cusik, on the other hand, got his weekly paycheck from the BBC.
To this day, no one, not even the BBC, can use the Dolex without buying a license from
the estate of Terri Nation.
Just to the plot of the story, after escaping from the Stone Age, the Tartus, and Tartus
is an acronym that stands for Time and Relative Dimensions in Space.
And that's the name of that police call box they travel in.
And it takes them to the far future where they meet the Dolex.
It seems that the Tartus has landed on the planet Scarrow, where two opposed races have
waged nuclear war, and one of those races has mutated into the Dolex, who live inside
mechanical boxes.
The other race, the Falls, are essentially blonde beauties who have become very pacifistic,
which is an odd choice when facing the Dolex or out to exterminate you.
So the Tartus crew has got to work on the Falls to get them to fight back against the
danger of the Dolex, which they do, and then eventually they make their escape in the
Tartus.
Now, this story plays out over seven episodes, which I would say is at least one too many.
There is, for instance, a long sequence of the Falls being led by Ian through a cave
system to attack the Dolex, and that whole thing is seriously plotting.
In any case, the story ends with the Dolex supposedly exterminated to themselves, but
the characters were so popular that they had to be brought back.
And ever since then, they have been supposedly wiped out many times, and always managed
to come back as a horde of evil.
Now, following the science fiction story of the Dolex, the next story should have been
a historical one, but it was a sprawling seven-part story that was not quite ready.
So the script editor, David Whitaker, whipped up a quick two-parter to fill the gap while
the historical story was made ready, and that was the edge of destruction.
In this story, there is a small explosion, which knocks out people in the Tartus, and when
they come to, they have slight amnesia and start acting strangely.
Early Barbara gathers enough clues to force the doctor to find the problem, which is a
broken spring in the fast-return mechanism, which instead of taking them back to Earth,
kept going and took them back to the beginning of time.
The strange things happening to them are explained as the Tartus trying to warn them.
The doctor fixes the switch and everything goes back to normal.
In terms of story, this is completely skippable, but it is worth watching for seeing Susan
turn violent and paranoid.
There is a scene where she takes scissors and starts stabbing the bed.
Initially, you think she's going to stab people.
So after that, we get this historical story, which was Marco Polo, and that was the one
that needed more time.
The plot is that the doctor is supposed to be trying to get everyone back to 1963 London,
but it seems he's not entirely capable of navigating the Tartus.
So they kind of bounce around a lot.
In this case, they end up in 13th century Central Asia, where they meet up with Marco Polo.
Polo has been entrusted with admission for the Great Khan, but political infighting is
the backdrop.
Now, a difference in this story is that it takes place over a number of weeks in storytime,
whereas most doctors whose stories are no more than a few days.
Now this is one of the stories that no longer exists in video form.
One of the things about the early stories is that the BBC at one point thought it would
be a great idea to reuse the videotapes, because it would save money.
Like I say, the BBC was very cheap in those days, and they were pension pennies everywhere
they could.
But because of that, a number of shows have been lost from the early days.
People have been trying to recapture as many of these as they can, and every once in a
while something shows up.
For example, since Doctor Who was shown in a number of foreign markets, they would occasionally
find a storeroom in Nigeria where this was supposed to either be destroyed or shipped
back to the BBC, but it just sat in the storeroom, in other places, Hong Kong or wherever.
Sadly, Marco Polo is not one of those rescued shows.
Now there is a team that is working on recovery, primarily a company called Loose Cannon.
What they do is they use production stills and audio recordings of the programs to put
out reconstructed versions, which is how I watched this program.
From what I can see, it was gorgeous, and to this day, I think it ranks as the number
one story fans want to recover.
In some missing episodes of other stories have been replaced by animations from Planet
55 Studios, I've put links to some of these things here in the show notes if you want
to follow up on any of that.
What has enabled all of these alternatives is that many fans recorded the soundtracks
of the episodes when they were first broadcast, and those soundtracks are the basis for
animations and reconstructions.
This problem has seriously affected the stories of the first two doctors, William Hartnell
and Patrick Troutney.
Starting with Doctor Three, who is John Pertwee, we have all of the episodes.
Some of Pertwee's were what they had left was a black and white, even though the story
was originally in color, but they have been able to go back and colorize those.
We do have all of the stories more or less as they were broadcast.
The story after this is the keys of Marinus.
We just had a historical, so now we do a science fiction.
The keys of Marinus is kind of a confused jumble of the story.
It's set on the planet Marinus where you have a peaceful race, who have developed something
called a conscience machine that erases all of the baser human emotions like greed, hatred
and violence.
But they are opposed by an evil race, the Voord, who are devoting themselves to taking
over, but first they need to control the conscience machine.
Five keys are necessary to operate it, and the five keys are dispersed.
So our travelers have to regain all five, which means a travel log adventure where each
episode is set in a different environment.
You might notice that the doctor seems to be missing for a few episodes here, and when
that happens, usually what it meant is they wanted to give the actor a vacation break.
So when these stories were done, it was really pretty much a full year round schedule.
Now fortunately Ian and Barbara carry things just fine.
One of the episodes has brains and jars, and that's kind of a lot of fun.
But doesn't the bad race out to destroy good race reminds you a bit of the dollocks?
And wouldn't you know, Terry Nation is also the author of this one.
Coming between two outstanding historical stories, Marco Polo and the Aztecs, does not
improve the rank of this story.
Pleasant enough, but not one of the milestones in Dr. Who history.
Again, note the alternation in the season between science fiction stories and historical
stories.
And so following this, we have the Aztecs, which is another very good historical story that
has the Tartus materialize in Aztec Mexico prior to the Spanish conquest, when the Aztecs
were at the height of their power.
It is interesting that they directly tackle the issue of human sacrifice, which of course
both the Aztecs and the Maya were known to do.
The author of finds an ornate bracelet and puts it on only to discover that it is for
the goddess, and she is now taken for being this goddess.
She tries to use the power this gives her to stop the practice of human sacrifice, but
discovers that the social inertia of this society is too powerful.
The practice of human sacrifice would not stop until the Aztecs were basically wiped
out by a combination of disease and conquest.
This is a story well worth watching.
Carolyn Ford is mostly missing.
She got her vacation time during this story, but the other three all deliver great performances.
This really is the exemplar of the great Dr. Who historical.
Now, after the previous historical story, we get the Sensorites, which is a science fiction
story set on an alien planet with an alien race.
Those being the Sensorites, of course, it starts with the Tartus materializing on a
spaceship from Earth, with two people who were apparently dead, but then it turns out
they aren't.
They have been placed in a catatonic state by the Sensorites.
Then the door locked to the Tartus is removed, stranding the travelers until they can get
it back.
It turns out the Sensorites have mental powers, and they communicate through Susan, who
also now seems to have some unusual powers.
Had the producers gone further with this idea, Carolyn Ford might well have stayed with the
show longer.
She was originally hired in on the premise that she was going to be playing an alien girl
with unusual powers.
Then they decided, you know, really, we just wanted to be a teenager who screams all the
time.
She got very disenchanted.
Now, the costumes here are pretty hokey, but honestly, that's the case throughout classic
Dr. Who.
The basic plot is good, revolving around a people who are mostly transparently honest
and trustworthy, but who have some evil appearing in their midst.
But is the greater evil among the Sensorites or among the humans?
And finally, after that science fiction story and historical story.
And this time it's called the Rain of Terror, and it's set in revolutionary France during
the ascendance of Robespierre.
There is the first small appearance of outside locations shooting up until now everything
was shot in studio.
There would be more location shooting the next season, for instance, in the Dalek invasion
of Earth.
But this is another good story with the ever-present threat of the Gillotine hanging over everyone,
which is pretty accurate for Robespierre's rule.
Partinal, in particular, shines in this story.
This is a story with a couple of missing episodes, which I saw as reconstructions that used
production stills in the soundtrack.
Now, this brings us to the end of the first season of Dr. Who.
Like any TV show, it is a mixed bag.
There were some very good stories, and a few not so good.
But this is where it all began.
So, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and is always encouraging you
to support Free Software.
Bye-bye!
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