One of my favourite dramatic themes are those where something apparently perfectly normal then gives rise to something mysterious and alien to what one originally expected. However, this revelation is often blown away by advertising or an 'irregular' scene before you even get started. Two of my favourite films uses that kind of approach, The Thing and Predator, and both fell foul of their advertising campaigns and opening scenes clearly setting the sci-fi theme, even though that element doesn't rear up until later in the films. Similarly, Doctor Who was no exception, with the blurb for the new show informing the potential audience that it was going to be sci-fi from the outset, and kicking off with a mysterious opening scene involving a humming police box in a junk yard - but did that have the potential to completely ruin the surprise in the story?

With An Unearthly Child, however, I think it gets away with it. Perhaps that's because it broadcast long before my time which means I've always looked at it in retrospect (and already familiar with what Doctor Who is about), and this means that my expectations are already set and so cannot be disappointed in that regard. Then again, friends who did see it on original broadcast didn't feel they were "spoilt" either, so this might be an unfounded worry.

Mind you, there's more mystery and suspense in the opening moments of "An Unearthly Child" than in many complete dramas - it's easy to see how potential fans would become immediately hooked by that haunting music that melts into a foggy backstreet of East London, a policeman slowly pacing his beat, and as he passes by a scrap merchants he misses the thrumming tone of a commonplace Police Box ...

If you'd tuned in a minute late you'd have missed that, of course, and so you'd be in the territory of familiar drama - a typical high school at the end of lessons, with a couple of teachers discussing a problematic student. It's the music that accompanies those scenes of Susan that alert us to there being something odd about her (though her comment of "That's not right" on opening a book on The French Revolution" should already have raised alarm bells!).

Even the encounter with a strange old man in a junkyard, though intriguing, is not something to spiral us off into sci-fi territory ... then, Barbara enters those police box doors and ...

"It's Alive!"

That moment is just as impressive now as it must have been back in 1963. The way in which the teachers' cosy world is suddenly thrown into scientific chaos must have been echoed in viewers as they try to get to grips with what just happened on screen. A murky junkyard transformed into a brightly lit stark white room, and within it a pupil they both know totally at ease and somewhat surprised to see them. "Is this where you live?" they wonder, as do we.

Then another revelation: Doctor Foreman ("Who?!!") and Susan are not from Earth at all, but have come from another planet entirely, and not only that they are also wanderers in the fourth dimension, too, in their Ship the TARDIS. And then, as the Doctor decides to kidnap the two teachers rather than lose his granddaughter we are flung through a whirling vortex to a stange, new "alien" world. (Okay we know that isn't the case by the following week, but you know what I mean!)

Well ... I'm hooked for the next 49 years ... :)

Trivial Bits

• I thought my mobile had gone off at one point ... being I have John Smith and the Common Men as my ringtone at the moment!
• I still think the mention of the decimal system is a great moment with hindsight, even if it was a safe bet even in the 1960s
• We never seem to get such "good" foggy days any more, though thank goodness the smoggy daze is long gone!
• Is Susan's comment on The French Revolution to become the first continuity of the series?
• "If I thought I was just being a busy body I'd go straight home" ... thank goodness Barbara didn't else where would we be now?!!
• So what does the girl whisper into the ear of the other one ... ?!!
• I'm not entirely sure why Susan had such a problem with D and E - why couldn't she just use them as constants (like the rest of us)?!?!
• "It would be so wonderfully normal" if Susan had been meeting a boy - would she have been shocked/outraged if she'd been meeting another girl in that junkyard!
• "Not quite clear is it?" - nor to me either, I'm still not sure how the skyscraper in TV analogy matches the dimensional transition from the outer plasmic shell into the interior!
• Time And Relative DIMENSION in Space, it's definitive, dontcha know!
• Another subtle difference in the early days is mentioned here, where the Doctor says they are cut off from their own planet, and then wistfully says to Susan that they'll get back one day. Later, it transpires he was effectively a fugitive from his people. I suppose these don't actually contradict each other though.
• And why was the Doctor seemingly initially worried that Ian and Barbara were the police? What had he been up to?!!!
• Shame we never had the long version of the dematerialisation/travel sequence sound in the TARDIS again in the series.
• Finally, wouldn't it have been strange if we were celebrating the 16th November as the anniversary, had the show gone out on its original schedule? And would it have lasted as long because of it [we have the pilot to compare against, would it have been so successful as the polished version we finally saw?]

In hindsight, this turned out to be quite an apt quote, as The Five Doctors was to be the first Doctor Who story that I recorded (and still have on the shelf some nigh-on 29 years later). It had been a toss-up between recording this and watching The A-Team (I think), or the other way around, but in the end I both watched and recorded it, phew! so, this story still holds a fond memory for me, and is quite possibly the one Doctor Who story I've watched the most!

If that wasn't enough, with next year (probably) seeing the final few episodes left to be released, this story happened to mark another first in being the premier release of the then newly-emerging DVD market some thirteen years ago (boy, how to feel old!)

"It's like a person ..."

For a story which is inevitably an indulgence in nostalgia, there's actually quite a lot of new ideas present. Immediately post-titles, we have a brand new TARDIS! As a kid I could only vaguely remember the "brown" one (Season 14), so the functioning "white" room was the one that was more-or-less permanently etched in my mind. So, to see a whole new-looking console room was quite something back then - already the story seems special.

Then we're treated to a 'new' First Doctor. I was enough of a fan by this point to know what the original (you might say) looked like, but the general viewing public might not have picked up on it being a different actor when watching... except the game had been given away with the opening speech by Hartnell at the start. Ah, well...

"Goodness me so there are five of me now"

Of course this is what we tuned in for! As mentioned above, Hartnell's death in the 1970s meant that he was recast for this story, and Hurndall did a pretty good job I think - he certainly worked for me as the First Doctor (who I'd only ever seen from The Five Faces repeat season a couple of years before). Actually, having seen all the Hartnell material that exists now he still stands up as a worthy successor to the role - it's a shame he died shortly afterwards, too, it could have been interesting range of adventures for Big Finish.

Of the other 'oldies', Troughton and Pertwee fall easily into their old roles, and are paired up with the show's two best-loved companions the Brigadier and Sarah respectively, with both Courtney and Sladen more than able to share the limelight with 'their' Doctor (though of course had Baker been present the dynamics would have been a lot different).

Ah yes, Baker. I think JNT did a good job in working around the actor's decision not to participate, all things considered, and the use of unseen scenes from Shada to at least feature the Fourth Doctor was quite inspired.

"That's my best enemy"

At this point, the Master was a common occurrence in the series again (indeed he was in the preceding The King's Demons - if a few months gap on television), and though it was also inevitable that he'd be popping up in the story I still groaned at his appearance (I've never been a big fan of Ainley's portrayal). Quite why the High Council would bother calling him in rather than send in a crack team of chancellery guards remains a mystery ... perhaps Maxil would have none of that (though with his absence in the story maybe he was the first to be dumped-I-mean-sent to the Death Zone!)

Also, the fact that the Doctor and the Master are sworn enemies seems to be another limiter on the latter's success in his mission, as immediately seen when he encounters the Third incarnation who doesn't believe him and promptly takes away his proof! Which of course then means he can't get the Fiith incarnation to believe him until it's much too late!

Still, *my* best enemy is in the story, too, which was good news! The Cybermen get a great deal of screen time in the story (I'm really glad it wasn't just the one wall scene early on), and have scenes with all four of the Doctors (albeit the First is hiding at the time!). They also of course feature in the highlight of the special, their demise at the hands of the Raston Robot.

Actually, in terms of enemies that's about it - there's the cameo by a Dalek and a Yeti, but not much else to speak of until Borusa turns out to be the big-bad for the show.

Borusa's turn "to the dark side" does seem a bit contrived for the story, and perhaps also needs the audience to understand his full history with the Doctor to appreciate why this should be considered a big deal (the preceding season's Arc of Infinity didn't really do much to establish enough sympathy with him - though I suppose it's John Arnatt that really engendered the relationship with his old pupil). The revelation certainly didn't inspire me at the time, nor now, come to that! [with hindsight, Season 23 could have done with something like this story, when we discover that it was the Valeyard/dark Doctor behind it all ...]

Shame that, with the exception of Susan and the cameo of K9, all the other guest companion appearances were handled as 'phantoms', so we really didn't get to see enough of them. Mind you, at the time I would have been hard-pressed to remember Liz except by Target novelisation, as only Jamie and Zoe had been on recently in The Krotons - even Yates was only vaguely remembered from the Spiders incident ...

You have to feel sympathy for Terrance Dicks with the number of rewrites he had to do, juggling the various "they're in, they're out" moments as the cast was being assembled/disassembled due to schedules etc. - I could just imagine Robert Holmes with his rictus grin lurking behind him whispering "I told you so"!

"I may not be breaking the laws of continuity, but I am bending them a bit"

Okay, so that is a slight cheat with the quote, but there are a number of elements that push what we'd consider the 'canon' - if the ramifications of out-of-sequence Doctors was complex enough in The Three Doctors, here it is just as convoluted in continuity pitfalls exacerbated by the former story.

The second Doctor's arrival at UNIT HQ sets the tone, with him pointing out he shouldn't really be there at all. But his later comments about Jamie and Zoe having had their memories wiped in their last adventure together were very out of place - how would he have known that being it was just before his change of appearance [cue the Season 6b advocates!].

Then we have the Master: it's established that Time Lords always seem able to recognise each other, but of course the Master is actually within Tremas's body and so is no longer 'Time Lord' ... this seems to be confirmed by the way in which the Fifth Doctor can never recognise him in disguise in any of their encounters, and also by the way in which the First Doctor is seemingly completely unaware of his former academy-mate's identity. But then the Third Doctor recognises him outright. Oops!

Not a continuity point per-se, but one that always niggles me whenever I hear it - why did the First Doctor assume that there were five Doctors, rather than "at least" five? There's no reason for him to know that the Fifth is the latest one he'd encountered! I'm also not sure why "Liz" would know there are five, either, being she is a phantom being cast from the Third Doctor's mind (well that's how I interpreted it at any rate!).

"To lose is to win, and he who wins shall lose"

And so ends a rather relaxed run-around of a special, with nothing too painful to tax the mind - it wouldn't have done too badly as a Christmas special in a modern series environment. There's no real menace to speak of, either (Raston Robot excepted) - it was more of a mild stroll to the Black Tower rather than an epic struggle to overcome the machinations of the Death Zone, and ultimately only Borusa was ever in any peril, as the inverse-ABBA resolution sees him turned into a living statue (this was quite a horrific scene, actually, seeing all those faces moving behind their facades - it certainly haunted me for a while afterwards).

The Time Lords themselves were pretty wasted, and their scenes were rather bland in general. Perhaps that's more down to what we'd really consider the main event, though, the banter between the Doctors, and with their respective companion partnerships during the course of the story - for them, the script really shines, and returning to my opening comments, watching them on the very first DVD would be a good taster to perhaps entice prospective fans into the infant DVD range.

I've recently had a lot of misgivings over the idea of juggling multiple Doctors into next year's anniversary adventure, but having just re-watched this story perhaps my worries are misplaced ... but the script writer, the director and the actors will ultimately make and break such a project should it happen.


The quote above could also be seen metaphorically to sum up Doctor Who itself - the Doctor effectively evading his responsibilities to roam around the universe, 'losing' his privileged title to 'win' his vocation in life. You could also say that, once he would had gained access to all knowledge (via the Matrix) he'd then lose his sense of adventure - okay, maybe this is overloading the meaning too much!

Trivial Bits

• UNIT HQ was also having its own anniversary - it's the same location as seen in The Three Doctors.
• Is it just me, but when the Brigadier says "I'm too old for this sort of thing", after so many Lethal Weapon films I'm expecting that sentence to end rather differently!
• Zodin? Zodin? Where for art thou, Zodin?
• Exactly what was the relationship between Flavia and the Master?
• No................... not the mind probe - Paul Jerricho will never live that down!
• Why does everybody seem to know about the Death Zone but not where on Gallifrey it is! Or indeed where it's control room is - did nobody decorating the High Council Chamber notice a panel when they were working there? Or did they tell Borusa and he bumped them off as his grand plan began to unfold? [I sense a short story coming along... :)]
• Turlough was in this story too, apparently!