Grab Bag Reviews: "The Daleks"

Ah-ha! Here we go then... the first appearance of the monsters which would come to define and symbolize Doctor Who. There is not a single incarnation of the Doctor who has not faced the Daleks at least once with the exception of the Eighth Doctor... unless you count the audio stories... but that's another story. Anyway... DALEKS!!!

It was still only 1963 and at the time of filming the first episode of the series hadn't even aired yet. Doctor Who, however, was already suffering from some of the problems with late scripts which would plague the show intermittently for years. As such, a script from a relative newcomer to writing for science fiction TV was pushed up to be the second serial of the series. The writer was Terry Nation.

Producer Verity Lambert was also taking a chance on Nation's script. The department head, and her boss, Sydney Newman, had made it clear from the start that he wanted "no bug-eyed monsters" on Doctor Who. Newman was well aware of the show's science fiction elements but he felt it would be detrimental to the program to include alien monsters. Lambert, however, was in need of a finished script to shoot and she also believed very strongly in Nation's story.

For his part, in later interviews Nation claimed that he wrote the script intending for it to educate children on the dangers of fascism. Nation had lived through WW II and was aware that the generation of children who would be watching the show would grow up only knowing the war though history books. As such he wanted an allegory to teach them the dangers of extreme viewpoints and to stand up against those views when they found them. Because of this, over the years, even more would be made of the ties between Nazism and the Daleks in later stories... particularly "Genesis of the Daleks".

Set designers, prop makers, and costumers also got their first crash course in Doctor Who sci-fi as they created the planet Skaro, the costumes for the humanoid Thals, the city of the Daleks and, of course, the Daleks themselves. It is a testament to their skill that, other than a little tweaking, the design has remained largely the same for over 47 years. And it should be noted that, although Nation gave some basic descriptions of the Daleks in his script it was the prop designer who truly designed the look of the Daleks.

When the first episode of the serial aired Sydney Newman was quite angry to find that his rule against "bug-eyed monsters" seemed to have been ignored. A few weeks later, however, when the audience figures came in and it was apparent that Daleks were the talk of the town he issued a written apology to Lambert and promised to allow her to make the decisions on what was best for the show.

The Daleks were a hit and they would go on to menace time and time again.

But is that first episode all it's cracked up to be? Or is it merely enshrined in viewer's hearts because it was the first?

The Plot: The Doctor, his granddaughter Susan and his still recently kidnapped Ian and Barbara land on a strange, alien planet. Disappointed at not being returned to Earth, Ian and Barbara still join in the exploration... for a time. When the Doctor wants to investigate a strange city, however, the others refuse and insist they leave the planet. The Doctor sabotages the TARDIS in order to get his way but upon arriving in the city the explorers are taken prisoner by the Daleks! The group also realizes that they are suffering from radiation poisoning but that there is another race of beings on the planet -- the Thals -- and that the Thals left them drugs to cure them back at the ship!

Susan retrieves the drugs and meets one of the Thals, who informs her that the Thals wish to make peace with the Daleks. Susan delivers this message back to the Daleks and the Daleks agree to peace... or so it seems. The time and space travelers soon learn it is all a trap for the Thals and they helped lure the Thals into it!

Upon escaping the Daleks the Doctor soon learns that a part vital to the TARDIS was left behind in the Dalek city. They must stage a raid to get it back but can they count on the help of the pacifistic Thals? Even if they get the help can the now primitive Thals stand a chance against the technically superior Daleks? And meanwhile, what plans are the Daleks hatching to remove the Thals from the face of the planet forever?

My Take: With this being a very early story in the series there is still a sense of the writers and actors getting their legs under them a bit. There are also some striking characterizations which would change over time and so viewers might find these interesting precursors for what would come.

"The Daleks" features a very different Doctor than the one we would become used to. Here the Doctor is a conniving [insert somewhat impolite term for a person born outside the bounds of marriage] as well as somewhat cold and uncaring towards his unwilling companions -- for example, at one point the Doctor is quite ready to go off and leave the missing Barbara without a single concern for her welfare. This aspect of the Doctor's personality would be changed with the very next story ("Edge of Destruction") but for "The Daleks" it is still in place. Of course it is interesting in that the Doctor's selfish actions put himself and Susan in danger and he is forced to admit to Ian and Barbara that he is at fault here and has no one to blame but himself -- a nice little moment of thaw for the cantankerous old coot and a hint of the changes to come.

Taking the first several serials as a whole -- from "An Unearthly Child" to "Marco Polo" viewers actually see a character arc for the Doctor. Not only is he self-centered, egotistical, and lacking empathy, he also lacks the impulse to help and interfere. Last year fans were treated to an all-new Doctor who proclaimed that bringing down the government was what he did but here we have a Doctor who declares that that the Thal's predicament isn't any of their affair and they're all just better off leaving. Of course, by the end, we see him actually kind of revelling in what he has done -- encouraging the Thals and promising to stop by and visit them at some point in the future to see how they are getting along. He warms considerably to the point where he becomes more recognizable as the Doctor.

Ian and Barbara also get the meatier character parts with this story. They are disheartened at not being brought back home immediately, they are fearful that they might not get back home at all, and they are increasingly adrift with nothing familiar to cling to except each other. Those scenes between the two actors have a ring of truth and a feeling of real emotion to them. Sadly, they are all too short and never really come up again. Jacqueline Hill's Barbara, however, gets a hinted romance with one of the Thals that is also tentative and rather sweet. The fact that the writers had to downplay the plot element because of the child target audience of the show actually works in its favor -- making it light instead of heavy-handed as most other emotional beats are here.

And therein lies one of the problems with the script -- Terry Nation goes rather heavy-handed on most of the elements. For example, it takes the "outsiders" of Ian, Barbara, Susan and the Doctor to teach the Thals to stand up for themselves -- gotta love that whiff of old-fashioned colonial attitude there. And when the Thals state that they would simply retreat if the Daleks attacked Ian and Barbara are rather horrified by the idea... this of course being a clumsy and thinly veiled attack on former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who went down in infamy for taking an appeasement approach to Nazi Germany. Viewers are also hammered with the idea that the Daleks hate the Thals for no good reason -- merely a dislike of "the Other" -- which is, again, an overly simplistic view of the practices of Nazi Germany. Although Nation was trying to put forth the dangers of radical fascism and the need to oppose them to children the message is sent home with rather more force than is required even for kids to get the idea.

There is one scene which, despite being as heavy handed as the rest, which still manages to soar with some lovely moral ambiguity and that is the scene in which the time travelers discuss getting the Thals to help them. Ian and Susan take the ground that it isn't right to ask the Thals to die for them and the Doctor and (surprisingly) Barbara take a more practical view that if they don't ask the Thals for help them they are condemning themselves to die or at the very least to being stranded on the planet for the rest of their lives. There is actually a good moral discussion here as it is pointed out that Ian and the Doctor have a moral duty to those in their charge but at the same time they also have a moral duty to not try to coerce the Thals into giving up their lives for something that will not benefit them.

For their part, the actors playing the Thals also get their meatiest moments around this discussion. There is something that actually feels rather right in their clinging to pacifism and even when they decide to go to war they do so with caution and deliberation rather than anger or vengeance.

It really is a bit of a shame, though, that almost all of the really interesting stuff -- the characterizations, fascinating dialogue, and moral discussions all come right smack in the middle of the serial... and most of the rest of the serial is like watching someone play a video game.

No, seriously, I realized it as I was watching the last two parts of the serial -- the whole thing seems like the levels of a video game... only with some really boring dialogue. And therein lies the second and third problems with this story -- it's formulaic and padded. Even with only one serial in existence before this one a pattern is starting to emerge -- our heroes get captured, our heroes escape, our heroes have to return to their captors, our heroes have to solve a problem or put a wrong right then they can leave. The trek to the Dalek city that Ian, Barbara and the Thals have to make leading up to the climax of this story really adds nothing to the overall tale. It provides some action/adventure bits but aside from that it doesn't really give us anything new about the Thals or about Ian and Barbara or even the Doctor and Susan. "The Daleks" ended up stretching for seven episodes and the padding quite frankly shows. Entire episodes where our heroes are stuck in a Dalek cell doing little but rehashing the stuff we already know or have already been shown (usually the rule is "show don't tell" or "tell don't show" the rule is never "tell and show"), entire episodes that don't really add anything to the overall story, etc. "The Daleks" probably could have been a really excellent four part story, maybe five parts but at seven parts it overstays it's welcome by far.

There are some other things which help offset the plotting problems. For one, while some of the special effects are not the best in the world the set designers really did a good job with the Dalek city. The low, asymmetrical doorways tell viewers immediately that the inhabitants of this city are not human in shape. They also lead to a palpable feeling of claustrophobia -- a sense that our heroes are trapped even before they really end up trapped. There is also some nice model work and the costumes for the Thals seem nicely alien. And the Daleks. Ah yes, the Daleks. Now, after the passage of all this time, it's rather impossible to imagine them looking or sounding any other way, really. For the time period, however, the design was quite revolutionary and looked like nothing else out there... and probably inspired many a mock Dalek battle at the dinner table using salt and pepper shakers.

Overall, while "The Daleks" definitely holds a place in Who history it suffers from the passage of time and too much padding. Still, there are some really great moments here and it is interesting to see the origins of the show's most iconic monsters. I'd say definitely give this one a watch... but keep the remote control handy to fast forward through the boring parts.

Happy Anniversary "Doctor Who"!

47 years ago today Doctor Who debuted on television. 47 years and eleven Doctors -- the longest running sci-fi TV show ever. And it all started in 1963.

So, to commemorate, I thought I'd break the "Doctor Who Grab Bag" tradition and just review the very first episode -- "An Unearthly Child".

I'm not going to go into too much background on how the show got up an running -- it's actually a pretty long and complicated tale. Needless to say, Doctor Who didn't just spring from some writer's head, fully formed like Athena. It's also a very interesting story which gives a peek behind the curtain at how shows are brought to TV.

Second of all, there are now two different versions of "An Unearthly Child". For decades the version which was broadcast on TV was the only one people knew. In more recent years the original 'pilot' episode has been found and is available on DVD with the first serial as an extra. The pilot is slightly different -- some of the dialogue is different and some of the pacing is different but the story itself is largely the same. The pilot was produced to show to the bigwigs at the BBC to get the series finalized. The BBC asked for some changes before broadcast and so there were some script tweaks, the whole episode was actually re-shot (because editing at that time was practically non-existent so they couldn't just cut scenes or reshoot one scene and then drop it in to replace a previous scene.

For the purposes of this review I'm looking at the broadcast version rather than the pilot version.

Also, there is some argument among Who fans about this story. Some insist that "An Unearthly Child" is a story unto itself even though it leads directly into the first serial. Some say that it is merely the first installment of the larger first serial. Again, for the purposes of this review I'm treating it as a separate episode.

And now, let us meet the Doctor for the very first time!

The Plot: School teachers Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton find something strange about one of their students -- Susan Foreman. 15 year-old Susan is a curious mix of genius intellect and ignorance and she seems very much a stranger in a strange land despite the fact that she claims to be a native. Trying to solve the puzzle, Ian and Barbara follow Susan home one night to confront her about the dichotomies in her life. There they find Susan's mysterious grandfather and an even bigger mystery in who and what Susan and her grandfather are. The two teachers are about to embark on a journey of a lifetime....

My Take: It has to be said that the story suffers a bit from being studio bound. Of course most things were in those days but here there are times when you can hear the "roominess" of the sound quality and where things just look too much like a sound stage. On the other hand, though, in order to hide that sound staginess the set dressers added a lot of shadows, darkness and fog which add to the atmosphere and really give the story a creepy edge and a sense that anything can happen. The setting puts one in mind of Gothic horror rather than sci-fi and that helps make the sudden reveal of the interior of the TARDIS so surprising. We go from darkness and shadows to bright white light and gleaming chrome. It's very effective.

Modern viewers will likely find the pacing very slow. It's kind of a talky story in which everyone stands around discussing things rather than doing. It is only in the last few minutes in which everything really takes off. Some of the dialogue is a bit repetitious but there at the end everything really starts to take off. Ian and Barbara have gone from the ordinariness of their classrooms and students into another world -- one which they cannot comprehend and so they try to make up stories to convince themselves they are not seeing what they really are.

The performances, though, are pretty top notch. Again, modern viewers will like find Carol Ann Ford as Susan overplaying her part. In truth, she's a little better in the pilot version of the story. Jacqueline Hill and William Russell, however, are fine and natural as Ian and Barbara. There is also an instant chemistry -- an easy rapport between the actors -- which really sells the idea that Ian and Barbara are long-time colleagues and friends.

The biggest difference people are likely to see in in William Hartnell. Most people are used to seeing his First Doctor in his more 'grandfatherly' mode. Charming, slightly befuddled at times, and warm. Here they are introduced to a cagey old man who is arrogant and dismissive. He's actually not a very nice person and that is especially borne out by the fact that he outright kidnaps Ian and Barbara to keep them from revealing what they have seen. No, it would be several more episodes before Hartnell softened the performance.

It's also interesting to see how much is set here. The TARDIS interior would change slightly over the years but the bulk of it would retain the white color scheme and the large roundels on the walls up until the series relaunched in 2005. There is also the first appearance of the familiar dematerialization sound which is still a part of the series.

Overall, though... Unless you are a Doctor Who fan who is interested in seeing how it all started this may not be the story for you. It's a great story, it's brilliant in it's own way, but it lacks a lot of punch. In all actuality, the pilot version of the story is a bit better with some better dialogue, better explanations and a bit more moodiness. But if you have the tolerance for a slower pace and more dialogue heavy scenes "An Unearthly Child" is worth half and hour of your time. The dialogue works and none of it is clunky or stupid and, of course, the last few minutes of the story are really hard-hitting and dramatic.

It's where everything began and all of the stuff we've come to expect -- all of the roots of the show are right here for everyone to see and get re-acquainted with.

Grab Bag Reviews: "The Time Meddler"

"The Time Meddler" was something of a watershed story for Doctor Who and it came at a time when there were many changes and upheavals.

Earlier in the season Carole Ann Ford had departed the show. Now, at the end, William Russell and Jacqueline Hill had opted not to renew their contracts and their last story was "The Chase". The production team decided not to replace Hill so Maureen O'Brien became the sole female character on the show and relative newcomer Peter Purves was hired to replace Russell in the male action lead position. Purves' character of Steven Taylor had been introduced at the end of "The Chase" but "The Time Meddler" marked his first full story. Now only William Hartnell was left of the original cast, it was, more or less, a changing of the guard.

In addition to the cast leaving, Verity Lambert, who had produced the show since it's beginning, had decided to move on as well. "The Time Meddler" would be the last story she produced.

The story was not only about farewells, however, it also marked several firsts. Up to this point Doctor Who had largely been broken into two types of stories -- science fiction and historicals. "The Time Meddler", however, would mark the first of a new genre for the show -- a blending of both the sci-fi and the historical into something which was termed "pseudohistorical". These stories would have most of the trappings of a traditional historical but throw in an element or two of sci-fi. In time this style would prove more popular than the traditional historical and would supplant the historical.

The other first "The Time Meddler" can boast is that it was the first story to introduce another of the Doctor's people. The name "Time Lord" would not be added until much later, but this is the first instance of the audience seeing another time traveler.

And so the second season ended with a new cast member, a new style of story, and new possibilities....

The Plot: After the whirlwind of their last adventure, the Doctor and Vicki take stock of their new situation. Ian and Barbara have returned home safely but they will be missed. Before they can be missed too much, however, the Doctor and Vicki discover a stowaway -- Steven Taylor, the fighter pilot they found stranded on the planet Mechanus! Steven is skeptical of the claims that the TARDIS can travel in time and space but when they land in England in 1066 he slowly becomes convinced.

Of course the TARDIS crew cannot stay out of trouble -- even here in the past -- There is a Viking scouting party in the woods, preparing for Harold Hardrada's invasion,and there is a mysterious monk who has the ability to alter the course of history... an ability he intends to use! 1066 was a turning point in England's history but it may all turn about wrong unless the Doctor and his young friends can stop the meddling monk!

My Take: I love this story, I really do. In addition to being the first pseudohistorical it is also one of those rare things in the early days of the show -- a comedy episode. Although I suppose it's more fair to call it an action-comedy; either way Doctor Who had only recently being playing around with doing stories which were more comedic in nature and this one is one of the best as Hartnell is at the top of his game here. Of course, it helps that he is given a brilliant foil -- comedy actor Peter Butterworth. Not well known here in the United States in the modern era, Butterworth was actually quite well known back in the day and in his native England. Audiences most certainly would have recognized him. Even without the recognition factor, Butterworth has timing, excellent physical comedy touches, and the ability to play off of Hartnell wonderfully in the scenes they have together.

Butterworth's meddling monk also makes for an interesting departure for a villain in the series. The monk isn't really that bad of a bad guy. He may threaten the path of history but he does it in order to make what he sees as 'improvements'... as well as to get money for himself. He's greedy and opportunistic but he isn't out to enslave the world or destroy a planet or an entire population unlike many the Doctor has crossed swords with.

There is a nice little mystery here as well. Viewers see early on that there is something not normal about the monk. He has a gramophone, a toaster, an electric skillet, and knowledge of the future. It is obvious that he is someone who is out of step with this time period but the writers spin out the mystery, keeping the truth a secret until the final episode when Vicki says the five words which would change the show's history: "The monk has a TARDIS!"

The third episode in this story is titled 'A Battle of Wits' and that's another thing you get here that you don't always get in Doctor Who -- a sense that this is a true battle of wits. Unlike with many other villains, the monk is largely alone here. There is no army backing him, no henchmen, lackeys, or toadies -- there is only the monk and the Doctor going mano-a-mano and that makes the story refreshing. The Doctor is pitting his own knowledge and low cunning against the monk's -- each one trying to get the upper hand, even if that means pulling dirty tricks. It really makes the viewer notice just how seldom the Doctor gets a true foil.

The real villainy here is provided by the Viking scouts. Their callous attitude towards taking what they need from the first village they find is chilling enough but the indications that they rape the Saxon villager, Edith, is simply chilling. These are cruel and violent men so their rather violent fate at the hands of the Saxon villagers is fitting. These darker turns, however, feel somewhat strange when compared to the lighter moments with the monk it has to be admitted.

As for the performances, well, I've already talked about Butterworth's fun turn as the monk. Hartnell is very obviously having a ball here and, despite blowing a couple of lines, he delivers some of the First Doctor's most memorably whimsical lines in this story. Such as holding up a Viking helmet to a skeptical Steven and pronouncing: "What do you think this is? A space helmet for a cow?" Or in managing to capture the monk warning him "And no more monkery!" There is also a well scripted sequence in which the Doctor manages to figure out the date by asking Edith a few simple, subtle questions and Hartnell plays the scene perfectly.

Maureen O'Brien takes on the new female lead position with aplomb. She convincingly portrays Vicki as smart, practical, logical, and quite the leader. There are also some nice scenes which help advance Vicki's character as she begins to assert that she has found a home in the TARDIS. O'Brien gives a pitch perfect reading of a line in which Vicki, believing the TARDIS is lost, tells Steven that he doesn't know what the TARDIS meant to her. O'Brien allows the simple line of dialogue to speak volumes about how Vicki feels.

On the opposite side of the scale is Peter Purves' Steven. I have to admit that, when I saw my first stories with Steven I chalked the character up as "Nearly Useless Pretty Boy". You know, one of those good-looking-but-usually-stupid male characters who sometimes show up in TV shows -- usually to make the main male lead look good. The only thing which saves the character from being completely useless is the fact that sometimes they actually do something right and/or are helpful. So yeah, that was my initial impression of Steven. Time, however, has caused me to change my mind and to recognize that Purves did something very interesting with the character of Steven. As many of the early episodes he was in had been written with Ian and Barbara as characters Purves found that his lines of dialogue were often a hastily re-written mish-mash of both characters. What this resulted in was Steven sometimes displaying what was, for the time period, female characteristics -- a heavy dose of compassion and intuition. While these could have emasculated the character, instead they actually lead to a more surprising and nuanced one. When the show began and for several years afterwards there was always one character who represented what I came to think of as "The Heart of the TARDIS" -- the character who embodied the empathy, sympathy, and more tender emotions of the show. Formerly this character had been Barbara; with Hill's departure though, the "Heart of the TARDIS designation did not fall to Vicki as may have been expected but instead fell to Steven. Peter Purves, although he has gone on record as being irritated at the time for getting stuck with Barbara's dialogue, actually decided to play it straight and with honesty instead of irony or sarcasm and it makes the character work and work well!

I will say this, though, Steven's long run of skepticism gets really annoying after the first episode. I understand the writers wanting to play things out but instead it makes the character seem a bit of a dim bulb. It also just feels a bit weird having a new character introduced at the end of a season. This is something that American TV just tends not to do -- if a new character is going to be introduced then it is usually done at the start of the season, not the end as was done here.

The guest cast aside from Butterworth are all solid although their characters are a bit more two-dimensional. They fill plot points in the story rather than being fully realized characters but at the very least they are likable plot points.

In the end viewers were treated to comedy, action, adventure, mystery, drama, and surprises all wrapped up with some cracking good dialogue. There are new characters to know and love, a new villain (who would show up again in "The Daleks Master Plan"), and a new style of story to add to Doctor Who's palette. In short, there's a little something here for everyone all done on some pretty darn good looking sets and with some pretty darn good costumes as well. Overall, this was a top notch story and a fitting close out to the season.

I don't always make mention of the DVD extras but in an odd bit of coincidence "The Time Meddler" was the last story Verity Lambert produced before moving on with her long and celebrated career and the cast and crew commentary track she recorded along with Peter Purves, story editor Donald Tosh and designer Barry Newberry for this DVD would be the last bit of work she did for Doctor Who before she passed away unexpectedly. There are some short but sweet tributes to this trailblazing woman on the DVD as well.

"The Time Meddler" is well worth 'meddling' with -- even for those who may not be fond of William Hartnell's version of the Doctor. There is a healthy dose of humor and a sense of childlike glee which pervades the entire story.

Everything You Never Really Wanted to Know About "Doctor Who" (so you didn't ask)

Doctor Who?

I, like a lot of people, had my first exposure to Doctor Who through my local PBS station back in the 1980's. Well, that isn't quite true -- I discovered a couple of years ago that my first exposure was actually through a local TV station near my uncle's place back in the early 1980's.

We used to spend a week or so with him every summer and one day we were 'rained out'. He lived near a lake and most days we spent most of the day either swimming in the lake or going out on his boat. One day a serious of thunderstorms rolled through keeping us penned up for the day. I had the TV on in the background -- waiting for the afternoon cartoons to come on. As there was nothing else on I stumbled onto this strange science fiction program. There was a man dressed in funny clothes and an elegant lady dressed in white and a robot dog and some kind of strange, crystal... It would not be until a few years ago that I learned what I had actually been watching was the last half of "The Armageddon Factor". I was intruged by the show but could not figure out what was going on (mostly because I had missed the first five epsiodes of "The Armageddon Factor").

But all that is neither here nor there. Where I first got a sense of what Doctor Who WAS was via PBS when I was a bit older. Unfortunately, my PBS station, like a lot of them, liked to show the entire stories run together late at night on a Saturday. When I was younger I wasn't allowed to stay up very late even on a Saturday, so it was seldom I got to see a whole story.

And then, as an adult, I found it again. Even more to the point, thanks to DVD popularity and illegal uploads on YouTube, I was able to see some of the show from the very beginning -- and I found it in many ways ahead of it's time. And this is all down to the unique vision and sometimes even courage of Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman...


In 1963, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) was looking for a "children's drama" to run during the afternoon 'tea time' slot. Then Head of Drama at the BBC, Sydney Newman proposed the initial idea for the show along with writer C.E. Webber and Head of Scripts Donald Wilson -- That a teenager and her two teachers would run across a mad old man and discover that he was named "Doctor Who" and was in possession of an invisible time machine.

By the time it reached production it had changed considerably and the producer hired to oversee the show -- Verity Lambert -- would change it further. Lambert was, at the time, the youngest producer at the BBC and one of the few women in the producer's chair. Between Lambert, Newman and some of the first script writers, the series began with a familiar format...

The teenage girl in the original idea was transformed into the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan. The two teachers remained but the "mad old man" called Doctor Who was changed into the irrascible character known only as "The Doctor". The 'invisible time machine' was changed to something that could travel through time and SPACE and was also given a visible format. Lambert wanted something that the actors could be filmed walking into and then wanted an exterior that would be something "ordinary" in order to contrast with the extraordinary interior. In 1963 the British Police Call Boxes could still be seen on many street corners -- these were bright blue painted sheds with a telephone where police officers in need of backup or public in need of police help could call in. There was also a small space inside where an officer could leave a criminal cuffed until a patrol car could come and take them to a precinct for formal charges and booking. The script had called for the exterior of the ship to change every time they landed in a new location to disguise itself among the local scenery but this had to be jettisoned early on when it became apparent that the budget would not cover the creation of a whole new exterior piece for each story.

The show was meant to be "educational" -- teaching children something about history or science in each story. And it should be mentioned that at this time the BBC traded mostly in what was called "Serials". Just like the old, American movie serials, each Doctor Who story consisted of several half-hour installments. Each story could as few a two parts or as large as twelve parts (although it should be said that this only happened once). The bulk of the stories, though, had either four or six parts to them.

The stories initially round-robined with one story traveling back in time for a history lesson and the next story traveling into the future for a science lesson. From the start, though, Newman made it clear to Lambert that he did not want the futuristic stories to have weird, alien creatures in them. He feared that this would lead to the show being seen as a joke and he referred to aliens, rather derogitorily, as "Bug Eyed Monsters".

With the show basically outlined, all that was left was the casting. Lambert picked character actor William Hartnell for the initally cantankerous Doctor. Hartnell was only 55 at the time but saw the program as a way of breaking out of his usual roles of military sargeants, policemen, and thugs. Unfortunately, he was already suffering from arterialsclerosis and this left him with, at times, a faulty memory.

Carole Ann Ford, 23 at the time, was cast as the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan. Ford was initially intrigued by the role -- particularly when she was told that Susan would be "mysterious" and would also be allowed to have weird, mental powers such as telepathy. To her dismay, she found that none of this materialized and her role increasinly became to scream and play damsel in distress (DiD for short around this blog)and she left after only a season and a half.

William Russell, 39 then, was signed on to play science teacher Ian Chesterton. Russell had recently been seen on British TV playing Sir Lancelot in a TV show by the same name. Realizing that the show would need at least a little action, and that Hartnell would not be up for physical fight scenes, Russell's Ian Chesterton was to serve as 'ordinary person' to be a stand-in for the audience, to be a relatable figure to children (after all, what kid doesn't have a science teacher of some stripe?), to be a plot device so the Doctor could explain things, and of course to be the action hero. Russell would leave the role after two years feeling as if he was growing stale.

Jacqueline Hill, 34, moved in similar social circles as Verity Lambert and, after discussing the new program with Lambert at a party, Hill was asked to audition. An accomplished stage actress, HIll agreed to take on the role of History teacher Barbara Wright. The character would, like with that of Chesterton, be one of the show's 'relatable' characters and exposition devices. She choose to leave at the same time as William Russell and took a break from acting in order to start and raise a family.

Once the cast was in place it was on with the show!

Initially, it was decided to keep the Doctor mostly mysterious. Although now everyone knows him to be alien, at the time that was not made clear. It was never asserted whether he and Susan were alien or human from a distant time period. In the first stories, though, he is a rather angry and even threatening character. He literally kidnaps Ian and Barbara in order to stop them from telling anyone of his ship -- the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space -- meaning it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside) and continues to denegrate their intelligence, insult them, and then attempts to kill a caveman in order to effect their escape. Fearing that their main character could end up scaring kids instead of entertaining them, Lambert ordered the third serial in the series to begin softening the Doctor's character. From there he would become the more well-known figure of the dottering, eccentric, whimsical but also crusading old man.

The other big change actually came in the show's second story. Lambert knew Newman's wishes about 'no bug-eyed monsters' but she felt very strongly about Terry Nation's script for the second story in the series. Nation, as many writers before and after him, used science fiction to deal with the issue of war in general and teach a bit of a moral lesson and allegory about WW II to a generation of kids who had never been touched by the fight. Thus, the Daleks were born. Thinly veiled stand-ins for the Nazi's, the Daleks were creatures hiding inside battle exoskeletons.

Despite the "bug eyed monster" element Lambert gave the go-ahead for the story, willing to take the heat from Newman... and he did call her on the carpet intially. When the ratings numbers for the story came in, though, Newman wrote Lambert an apologetic letter saying: "Do what you think best because obviously I don't know what I'm talking about." The Daleks were a hit and they would remain a hit up to the present day. There has not been a single incarnation of the Doctor who has not had at least one Dalek story (save the Eighth Doctor... sort of. More on that later).

Once the Daleks were out of the way the floodgates were opened to new and wild alien allies and enemies. Along the way, the purported science and history content -- always thin to begin with -- fell by the wayside but the show continued to deliver moral lessons both obvious and unobvious and put its characters into some suprisingly adult situations. In one story, Barbara, being chased by a local warlord, finds shelter with a poor merchant most of whose family had been slaughtered by said warlord's men. Living only for revenge and his last surviving daughter at one point the man puts Barbara and his daughter into hiding and gives Barbara a knife and asks her to kill his daughter if they are found by the warlord's men -- rather than have her suffer indignities at their hands. In another story Barbara is nearly raped by a fur trapper.

Over time, as well, the historical stories would become fewer and fewer in favor of more sci-fi stories. The sci-fi stories were found to garner better ratings. The historicals would not die out completely until after Hartnell left the role but they added in what would come to be called the "psuedo historical" -- a story set in an historical time period but with sci-fi elements.

The show also proved it's flexibility when Carole Ann Ford left. The writers worried if the show could survive the loss of one of the original cast members but they wrote in a replacement and soon breathed a sigh of relief as they saw the audience accept Vicki as a replacement for Susan. This would effectively set precedent for the regular changing of companions. Vicki (played by Maureen O'Brien) replaced Carole Ann Ford, Steven Taylor (played by Peter Purves) replaced Ian and Barbara, Dorthea "Dodo" Chaplet (played by Jackie Lane) replaced Vicki (sort of. Not getting into it, it's Trivial Pursuit stuff), When Purves left the show Lane was rather uncermoniously forced out behind him as the production team at that time didn't think her character was working out. Starting with a clean slate, the production team added Ben Jackson (played by Michael Craze) and Polly (played by Anneke Wills).

So the series proved it could withstand multiple changes of the guard... but could it withstand the ultimate change -- that of the Doctor himself? By 1966 Hartnell's health was deteriorating. He was often ill and his scenes had to be filmed around these illnesses and his memory problems were growing worse -- with him more often flubbing lines or forgetting chunks of dialogue. On top of all of that, Lambert and her production team had left the series by this time and the new production team and Hartnell did not get along well. It was agreed upon that Hartnell would leave the series. But Doctor Who was still going strong, still popular with the audience. Cancelling the show was out of the question but how did you replace the lead actor? And more to the point, who did you replace him with?......

To be answered in our next installment!