August 26, 2024

The First Doctors

“I am the one and only. Nobody I’d rather be.”

On the 5 November 1988 episode of BBC One’s Saturday morning children’s magazine programme Going Live! incumbent Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy took questions from an audience of children. One of those posed, by someone who was roughly the same age as me, rather annoyed my nine year old self: “How many Doctor Whos have there been?” I mean, really? You get a chance to ask Doctor Who a question and that’s what you go for? Because the answer was obvious, right? Indeed the kind of thing everyone could and should know? Apparently not, it seemed. 

Unbeknownst to him, and indeed to me, the question was raised that same month by someone who considered the answer to the question open. One of McCoy’s predecessors, Edmund Warwick. Who? Well, exactly. (Sorry, sometimes this stuff is hard to resist.) The veteran actor, then 81, was interviewed by his local newspaper¹ on the topic of Doctor Who’s 25th anniversary, in which he explained that “Most people think that there have been seven Doctors - but you see, there were really eight!”

While Warwick’s story is better known now than it was then, it’s worth running through here. Early in the first series of Doctor Who Warwick had appeared in The Key of Marinus (1964), playing Darrius, a man who’d inadvertently created the episode’s titular The Screaming Jungle. Watching it now it’s a nice, small part. One which allows us to know that Warwick had a good voice for stage work, and lets him to show a bit of range, sliding from threatening to pleading to desperate in a few lines.

There are dozens of parts like that in every black and white series of Doctor Who, and you’d expect it to be forgotten pretty quick. But it wasn’t. Let’s let Mr Warwick tell his own story -

“I was rehearsing another programme for the BBC when I got the call to stand in. He was supposed to collapse in a wood and be taken off on a stretcher, but unfortunately he was knocked out cold when his colleagues dropped him. I put on the flowing coat and large hat, shaved off my moustache and was carried out on the stretcher instead and earned thirty pounds.” ²

This is not quite right, not least because Hartnell’s Doctor isn't wearing a hat in that scene, and Warwick is presumably conflating in anecdote as actors so often do. It was on 2 October 1965 during camera rehearsals for Day Of Reckoning where supporting artistes carrying Hartnell on a stretcher inadvertently dropped him. Hartnell did complete recording of that episode, but after some back and forth with the production office, was granted the next week off to rest, and it was for the 9 October recording of The End of Tomorrow that Warwick substituted for Hartnell, performing an action much as he described twenty or so years later.

(It was possible for Hartnell to miss a whole episode in this way because in the 1960s Doctor Who was made to a weekly schedule, being rehearsed throughout the week and then recorded, largely in narrative order, on a single evening.)

The Doctor’s dialogue was divvied up between his granddaughter Susan (Carole Ann Ford) and her beau David (Peter Fraser), and you can see exactly how it was done by consulting the serial’s 1977 novelisation, which writer Terrance Dicks based on a version of the script pre-dating Hartnell’s accident.

It’s telling that the production office did not consider for a moment actually having another actor show his face to camera as the Doctor, let alone deliver any dialogue as him. That kind of “going on” in a theatrical tradition, of effectively letting an understudy perform, was not unknown in mainstream television of the time, although not often for leading roles unless it could not be avoided.

Warwick wasn’t actually the first person to stand in for Hartnell. Brian Proudfoot had similarly doubled for him, face away from camera, on location for Guests of Madame Guillotine (1964) and played the Doctor’s shoulder when he needed to look over at himself due to the time-track skipping shenanigans of The Space Museum. But the fine distinction here is that Proudfoot was principally an extra / supporting artiste, who occasionally played small and sometimes speaking roles.³ Whereas Warwick was an actor of the same generation as Hartnell, and like him one who’d been working since the late 1920s. Warwick had a solid career in the theatre, but unlike Hartnell had only really been involved in a small way in the relatively new medium of television.

Working out which other series Warwick was pulled out of rehearsing is not easy. Other television of the time is not as well (or at least as publicly) documented as Doctor Who. The episode of R3 entitled A State of Anxiety and transmitted on 20 November 1964 is a good guess, based on a usual BBC schedule of the era. Sadly it’s unlikely to an episode of A Tale of Two Cities transmitted in May 1965, which starred Patrick Troughton. That really would be too prescient.

Helping out Doctor Who at such short notice led to a third role for Warwick, one that seems to have come about as a direct consequence of it, with him making meta-text into text by playing the Daleks’ evil robot Doctor Who in two episodes of the next Dalek serial, The Chase: Journey Into Terror and The Death of Doctor Who and for the same director, Richard Martin.⁴

At the end of Journey Into Terror, Warwick plays the robot in mid-shot, and Hartnell plays him in close up from the other side of the studio, as dictated by the production constraints of the time.

As you can see above, Warwick is of a noticeably different build to Hartnell, but it’s still a great cliffhanger, in part thanks to the shock of Hartnell’s final close up and the Robot Doctor Who’s harshly delivered “Infiltrate and kill!”

What the next episode, demonstrates is that ever-ambitious director Richard Martin has very slightly more faith in the effectiveness of the ruse than is justified. Because while Warwick was clearly a good actor (based on The Screaming Jungle) and a suitable double for Hartnell when not standing next to him or with his face obscured (based on The End of Tomorrow) the impersonation he wasn’t quite so successful when, well, people could actually see what William Hartnell looked like in shots immediately before or after.

In some shots, not just close ups but wider angle this week, Hartnell plays the Robot, meaning that Warwick ends up playing the real Doctor. When he does so, his dialogue is overdubbed by Hartnell, but he’s still acting the part. Physically, he gets Hartnell’s walk and the way he holds his walking stick right. The way he tilts his head is spot on.

Which arguably makes Edmund Warwick the first actor to really play Doctor Who on television other than William Hartnell. That’s not quite being “the Eighth Doctor” as the News, Portsmouth claimed in 1988, but it’s still a not insubstantial thing to be.

So while people would generally agree that when David Bradley emerged from the snow at the end of The Doctor Falls he became the third actor to play “The First Doctor" following Hartnell and Richard Hurndall (1910-84) who played it in the Doctor Who twentieth anniversary special The Five Doctors (1983) there’s a bit of me that thinks we need to add Warwick to that list.

If we have a list that is.⁵ Which, being Doctor Who fans, is more likely than not, don’t you think?

Warwick is credited onscreen for his role in The Death of Doctor Who, unlike in The End of Tomorrow, and his credit reads Robot Dr Who. One might mischievously parse that as meaning both the Robot and Dr Who. After all when an actor plays two roles in Doctor Who in the 1960s there is not always, or even usually, punctuation to separate the roles. E.g. Patrick Troughton’s end credit for The Enemy of the World uses a space, rather than a backslash, between Dr Who and Salamander.

Too far? I suspect so. But this brings up, at least for me, a connected, if perhaps orthogonal point. Bradley had, of course, previously played Hartnell (and thus briefly Hartnell-playing-the-Doctor) in An Adventure in Space and Time, the acclaimed 2013 TV play about the genesis of Doctor Who.

While no one would dispute that this made it easier for him to assume the role, Hurndall’s single appearance in the part also meant there was precedent for more than one actor playing a single incarnation of the Doctor, even if you’d not thought already about Edmund Warwick to the ludicrous extent I’ve pushed you into here.

Bradley’s surprise-to-many-appearance, and the news he would be co-starring with Peter Capaldi at Christmas, prompted some discussion as to whether recasting other Doctors in the same way would be an acceptable move. After all, it is quite hard to imagine either the Troughton or Pertwee Doctors being played by another actor onscreen, even were those actors Sean Pertwee or one of Troughton’s several acting children or grandchildren, as has been often suggested by fans - and has happened on audio.⁶

If recasting Troughton or Pertwee would not be acceptable, which seemed to be the consensus, even though recasting Hartnell is, and seemingly long has been, it’s worth wondering what is that make this distinction valid. Is it simply that there is a precedent? Doctor Who fans are, after all, very keen on precedent, and enjoy deferring decision making to the authority of the series’ own past in our own cargo cult version of jurisprudence.

Doctor Who’s 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner’s decision to cast another actor as Hartnell’s Doctor was not an easy one for him. He originally intended the “First Doctor” who appeared in the special to be revealed as an imposter, feeling that another actor imitating Hartnell’s performance would be disrespectful. It was only after correspondence with Hartnell’s widow Heather about the idea of an imposter Doctor, in which she volunteered the opinion that her late husband would not have objected to another actor playing his character, and possibly the withdrawal of Tom Baker from the serial meaning there was space to give the substitute “First Doctor” a proper piece of the action, that Nathan-Turner threw caution to the wind.

However, it’s possible that “It’s been done before,” isn’t the real reason this recasting seems conceivable, in a way others do not. I think it goes deeper than that. William Hartnell’s character is not, except in his 1972 return appearance in The Three Doctors (1972/3) “The First Doctor”. He is, simply, Doctor Who. Not merely the original, but the one and only. “Doctor Who/Dr Who” (as he’s almost always referred to in contemporary material) was a role that existed in some scripts, and William Hartnell was cast to play that role. That’s a fundamentally different casting process than that anyone else who has played the Doctor went through, and far more like the casting of, well, most other roles ever to exist in drama.

In a strange way, the Original Doctor is a character who can be separated from William Hartnell’s performance. He was already there on the page. Later Doctors, counterintuitively, are less easily separated from Hartnell. The subsequent actors are all playing, in their own Doctor, someone to whom Hartnell (and then other actors) has already given life. Patrick Troughton, David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa are all literally playing someone who used to be William Hartnell⁷ who has undergone a physcial and perhaps mental transformation. William Hartnell is playing a character in some scripts he’s been given. 

Is this why it’s proven possible to recast The First Doctor more than once? Doctor Who is a character who already exists before Hartnell gets to him. Any actor could pick up An Unearthly Child and find their own interpretation of it. Richard Hurndall’s performance in The Five Doctors is, contemporary publicity aside, hardly reminiscent of Hartnell’s at all. It is not an impression, but it is recognisably Doctor Who, the pre-existing character. Whereas “The Xth Doctor” is a version of the person Hartnell played that only exists within the performance choices of another actor, and is thus impossible to recreate without them. This is why television Doctor Who has had only one Third Doctor but, so far, between three and five Firsts.⁸ 

If that’s the case then hats metaphorically off, rather than misrememberingly on, to Edmund Warwick who showed it could be done. The original replacement original, you might say.