It’s probably no great surprise that my writing of time travel related stories was inspired by other time travel related stories, including TV shows such as Doctor Who.  I’m not (quite) old enough to have watched Doctor Who from the very beginning but thanks first to VHS, and then to DVD, I have been able to watch many adventures made before my time.  Recently, Doctor Who celebrated its 50th anniversary (having begun in 1963), so I thought it might be fun to watch through all the adventures from day one to present day.  This is likely to take some time, but I begin with the very first episode – An Unearthly Child.

There are a number of different versions of what today would be considered the “pilot” episode of Doctor Who.  This was due to technical issues and to the Head of Drama wanting to tighten up the story a little.  The normal episode duration for Doctor Who is 22-24 minutes, but the “raw” version of the pilot stretches to 35 minutes.

The first thing to say is what everyone already knows.  The first episode of Doctor Who is a classic of unparalleled proportions.  The characters, the dialogue, the story, the motives, everything works to grab your attention and captivate you.

Even when there are fluffs, flaws, dialogue jumbles, cameras tripping over things, and those doors banging away – not even these are enough to distract you from the performances of those telling the story.

To anyone who believes that any of these actors are less than they might be, one only has to watch them in the TARDIS during the “door banging” scene.  Despite all that’s going on around them, the four of them just get on and deliver their lines with conviction.  Nothing and no one will make them deviate from what they’re doing.  It’s difficult to imagine any modern actor putting up with that and still being able to deliver their lines.

William Hartnell’s Doctor is much more gruff here than he became in the “official” first episode, and this works to his benefit.  Being like this makes him more detached from the human characters of the schoolteachers, and it works very well.  Carole Ann Ford valiantly puts Susan across as being somewhat different to her human teachers and classmates.  The dialogue suggests that Susan and the Doctor are from Earth’s future, not some alien “unearthly” race which both adds and takes away something from the episode.

What it adds is a different motive for the Doctor setting them off on their first journey.  He’s afraid, near terrified, that letting the schoolteachers out of the TARDIS would corrupt their (his and Susan’s) past because they’d have knowledge of time travel – or, at least, of technology far ahead of their time.  That’s an element of the story that appealed to me much more than the “official” reason in the reshoot.  It’s a little like Dominick Hide in that respect.

What it takes away is the alienness of the Doctor and Susan, which might have led the series in a different direction.  There may have been a lot less “alien worlds” that they visited if the Doctor and Susan were “humans from the future” rather than a different species entirely.

There’s also the suggestion here that, although the Doctor and Susan are in their own past, they may not have been the prolific time travellers that we later realised that they were.  The lack of the scene of Susan disbelieving the French Revolution points to this (having her correct the book in the “official” version makes it very clear that the Doctor and Susan have been time travelling quite a bit before ending up in 1960s Earth).  Without that, it could be implied that 1963 Earth was their first and only destination so far.

I shall watch the other two “versions” of the first episode before continuing with the first caveman story.