Dad, dig this new mod fad. It's a gas!

So proclaimed an advertisement for mop-top wigs so you could look like the Beatles at weekends. Obviously I'm not going to expect readers of this blog to have watched everything I'm talking about, but if you've never seen the first ever episode of Doctor Who, "An Unearthly Child," you really should watch it here.

Part of the point of this project is to align my timelines. What do you think of as old? If someone talked to you about an old piece of music, you might imagine it being from the 14th Century, but an old song might be from the 1950s. An old play could be from 400BC, but an old copy of a play is more likely to be from the 1980s. And old person, depending on your age, might be from the '30s, but old meat is probably from last week. An old TV show is unlikely to be from before '60s, and old Doctor Who can't be from before 23 November, 1963. But to a lot of people these days, "old Doctor Who" refers to anything from what's also called the "Classic Series."Doctor Who starring Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker doesn't seem "old" to me - it seems "middle"! But to Sarah (my girlfriend; get used to hearing about her), who at the time
had only watched the 2005 season, Genesis of the Daleks (12.4) seemed ancient. So I've watched An Unearthly Child (1.1) countless times, but I've never watched it as "new." (Pre-'90s Doctor Who each story was serialised in weekly, 25-minute episodes. From 1963 to 1966, each episode had its own title and the stories didn't. Titles for the stories of this period were applied after the fact, and sometimes the name of the first episode is used, as it is in this case. When it's in italics I'm referring to the serial, and when it's in quotes I'm referring to the episode.)

Having immersed myself as much as I could in Britain of the early '60s, "An Unearthly Child" seems very contemporary in a way that probably took viewers by surprise who were expecting the usual children's science fiction fare. If you want a comparison, check out Fireball XL5, a 1962 series by Gerry Anderson, who would go on to create Thunderbirds. That's what sci-fi was: rocket ships, aliens with funny foreheads, and questionable American accents. All of which would eventually make appearances in Doctor Who, but Doctor Who begins in East London on 23 November, 1963. A modern-looking school - a place, as Tulloch and Alvarado point out, not unlike where many of "An Unearthly Child"'s viewers were only hours previously - with modern, young, not-that-uncool teachers like Ian and Barbara. Susan listens to pop music. The fictional band to which she is listening, John Smith and the Common Men, has gone to Number 2 in the charts - the position "She Loves You" was occupying in real life. And this realism even extends to
televisual reality, as the first half of the episode feels very much like a "kitchen sink drama," a popular form at the time which emphasised normal settings and realism:

It has to be said: the opening half-episode is a lot like a well-meaning TV play about a domestic tragedy, with teachers following a girl home and finding out that she's living in squalor / a sweatshop / an arranged marriage / a family with no parents and six younger children... (Wood and Miles)

All this serves the overriding aesthetic of the uncanny, established in the opening sequence: a police box that hums. (There's more to it than that...why didn't they ever bring Waris Hussein back to direct again? Apparently he was rather nervous directing this serial, but it doesn't show.)

"Familiar but odd" was what Verity Lambert's team was going for in all aspects of the production (including, for instance, the title sequence, the theme tune, the characterisation of the Doctor), and in that way they were very consciously creating a kind of science fiction that hadn't really been seen on small or big screens before (The Twilight Zone being a notable precursor). Doctor Who, let's remember, came out of a 1962 BBC internal report about what kind of science fiction would work best on television. They specifically wanted to avoid sci-fi of the "Attack of the Bug-Eyed Monsters from Space" mold (and succeeded for exactly five episodes) that was dominating cinematic/American sci-fi at the time. The result - strangeness and danger in the familiar, a certain paranoia and overall feeling of menace, and ordinary people getting caught up in a larger game - is less reminiscent of most science fiction before or since, but strikingly similar (in tone, not story) to another creation of 1963. John le Carré had two months previously released in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold a new kind of spy novel; one which dealt in moral ambiguity in tattered, mundane back rooms and streets, rather than the post-imperial heroism in the space-age sets and exotic locations featured in the Bond books and (now) films. At least in terms of setting, "An Unearthly Child" takes us from one to the other - grotty East London suddenly gives way to the gleaming, impossible sight of the TARDIS.

"An Unearthly Child" does show its "live television" roots. In 1963, videotape was a very recent invention. Television was able to be transmitted long before it could be recorded, making television of the '50s and before very much "electric theatre." Actors would have many rehearsals, then there would be a tech rehearsal in the studio, and on "the big night" they would perform. One advantage over theatre was that there could be multiple sets, but the actors had to travel between them to get to the next scene. If the programme was repeated, it meant that the actors and crew all came back and did the whole thing again (which was obviously quite normal in the theatre). Also, once an actor died on screen during a live drama. It was about the survivors of a nuclear attack, so the fact that he collapsed and died didn't look too out of place, except that he was supposed to turn out to be the main antagonist. While the producer ran around during the act break giving everyone new lines, the young assistant who was left to make sure Act 3 could still happen was one Verity Lambert, who would become the first producer of Doctor Who. Anyway, even when prerecording became the norm, the cost and difficulty of editing videotape meant that things had to go catastrophically wrong for a retake to be called. Boom mics and line fluffs. Realism lost, or maybe just the acting. At any rate, these days, the only difference between film and television is narrative, and it's hard for my generation to even conceive of a time when they were such wholly different media. So "An Unearthly Child" (the episode) was shot in scene order, even the flashbacks - the way television drama had been done for almost 20 years.

But then one thing happens that could not be done before videotape: Ian and Barbara enter a police box and find themselves in a huge control room. It's the point of no return, not only for our protagonists, but for television. Doctor Who is at its best when it shows viewers things they have never seen  - or even imagined - before. The theme, which was if not the first, one of the first TV themes performed entirely electronically; the titles, which were similarly experimental; the TARDIS set. It must have been startling, and terrifying, and utterly new. Of course, it was also rather bewildering, and the next three episodes - a sort of Shakespearean drama performed by cavemen - are not the best examples of Doctor Who. But I happened to know that the week after that, in a seemingly abandoned city in a petrified jungle on a distant planet, something would attack Barbara, and that's when things would really get interesting.