"You say it's your birthday..."
Doctor Who is sixty this week, and his encounter with The Star Beast is imminent. But unlike ten years ago, this year’s Doctor Who anniversary special is transmitting a couple of days after the show’s birthday, rather than on the day itself.
That makes sense, Saturday is a better night for Doctor Who than Thursday, as anyone who had to juggle watching Season 21 with school day bedtimes as a child will tell you; and besides having new Doctor Who on the series’ actual birthday is actually a rare occurrence.
But if you’re looking for a Doctor Who episode to stick on to mark the day, why not choose one of the surprisingly small number of episodes to actually be shown on 23rd November? You could do a lot worse.
An Unearthly Child
Is the day you’re born a birthday? Your nothingth birthday? Sort of like Zaphod Beeblebrox? Perhaps. But it would obviously be remiss to write about episodes that went out on 23rd November without bringing up the great grand daddy of them all. Now, while by definition the first episode of Doctor Who went out the day Doctor Who started, it went out again a week later as well. The international trauma of that time, hours after the assassination of US President John F Kennedy, and the programme’s rather low viewing figures, suggest that many people’s memories of watching it actually stem from seeing that repeat showing of the episode. (This wasn’t planned, BBC management took pity on their new series’ situation, and showed the first episode again immediately before the scheduled premiere of the second.) It’s been repeated a bunch of times since, and on a wild array of BBC channels, as befits its status as Doctor Who’s originating moment. Sadly, it’s not being repeated this year. Nor is it on iplayer, and so there isn’t a link to it in the title or episode number as there is with everything else in this post. This is because of a very silly man who I’m not going to talk about.
An Unearthly Child is an episode that does reward repeated viewing in the way that the first made or transmitted episodes of TV giants often don’t. The first episodes of series such as Star Trek or Coronation Street have acquired a weight because of history rather than because of anything about them per se. An Unearthly Child’s lasting artistic, rather than historical, value is there in the complexity of Hartnell’s performance, the crisp dialogue, the difficult-for-TV-then camerawork (e.g the POV shot flashbacks of Susan’s lessons).1 Then there’s the startling sound design, the wonderful TARDIS set, the seemingly effortless evocation of a cold east London street in an overwarm west London studio2vand the relationship between Ian and Barbara. (Are they already a couple? Perhaps. They are certainly close. They talk to one another without restraint, and she enters his classroom uninvited and without waiting for him to answer the cursory knock she probably3 does on the door. They don’t respect each others personal space, and he goes along with her frankly bonkers plan to stalk one of their students very easily and with quiet amusement.)
An Unearthly Child has drawn praise in retrospect from a huge number of people including, to pick two of them almost at random, Douglas Adams and Stephen Poliakoff. The latter included it in a list of the greatest TV ever for Radio Times, and the former explaining that he’d called up a copy when working on Doctor Who in 1978 and come to the conclusion that it was better than the stories he was involved in.4
Its final shot is incredibly important, establishing not just the prospect of menace with the shadow thrown towards the police box (thrown by what? who?) but also the way that police box sits incongruously on a blasted heath, tilted slightly to one side. Doctor Who’s storytelling and aesthetics are all about juxtapositions and this is not quite the earliest, and also one of the best. Everything from the Daleks on Westminster Bridge to the Master dancing at the Tsar’s winter palace flows from this single image.
The Invasion (Episode Four)
It was 1968 before the 23rd November fell on a Saturday again, with a few near misses along the way. The Invasion Episode Four is an action packed Troughton instalment featuring UNIT, Cybermen and a real helicopter. The extensive filmwork, and the quality of the rest of the story suggest that this would have been an impressive instalment, a statement of Doctor Who’s vigour if not a conscious birthday celebration, but sadly we can’t know that, as the second and last monochrome Doctor Who episode to be transmitted on 23rd November is lost to posterity. (“Lost! Sssh! Lost!”) Fortunately, an off air audio of it survives. This is available on CD, and was used to soundtrack an attractive animated reconstruction. The cliffhanger is great too.
The Three Doctors (Episode One)
For the first half of the 1970s Doctor Who’s annual series ran from January to May, meaning there was never new Doctor Who at the end of November. The series’ start date sneaked into very late December as the decade wore on, and 23rd November 1974 was a Saturday, but Doctor Who wasn’t on between 8th June to 28th December that year. Gah!
However, the massive ratings success of the first Tom Baker run meant there were de facto two series of Doctor Who in 1975, the second running Autumn to Winter. The Android Invasion, shown on 22nd November 1975, became the closest thing yet to a colour Doctor Who episode first broadcast on 23rd November. Appropriate, given Terry Nation’s key role in getting Doctor Who this far, but still close, but no cigar.
The Three Doctors is thought of as Doctor Who’s tenth anniversary story, but it was shown from December 1972, closer to the series’ ninth birthday than its tenth. The Three Doctors Part One, though, managed to be repeated on 23rd November 1981 on BBC 2. This time it was eight years late for the tenth anniversary, rather than eleven months early. Which is about par for the course for the TARDIS.
Although there have been multi Doctor stories since, The Three Doctors was a unique achievement in that it really does feature all the Doctors up to that point, albeit with William Hartnell’s participation reduced due to illness. Nevertheless, the put downs he aims at his “replacements” have been repeatedly used in montages in the decades since, while Troughton and Pertwee’s onscreen chemistry as the bickering Doctors sets the tone for all subsequent multi Doctor stories.
It’s also worth noting that the use of the serial’s villain Omega in Arc of Infinity (1983) makes a lot more sense if you factor in this repeat. Much of Doctor Who’s audience would have seen this story little more than a year before its sequel, making the revival far less obscure than it might seem.
Doctor Who was also transmitted in the first quarter of the year from 1982 to 1985, but producer John Nathan-Turner not only desperately wanted to ape The Three Doctors by making a multi Doctor story, he also wanted to transmit it on or around the actual anniversary. So much so that in late 1981 he wrote to his departmental superiors asking for the 1983 series to transmit in late 1983 rather than early in the year. To avoid the problem that this would leave Doctor Who off air between early 1982 and late 1983 he proposed to bring at least some of the 1983 series forward to late 1982, in effect doing what had been done in 1975 and having two series in a year.
This would actually have been possible, as the series was being shot quite far ahead of transmission due to Peter Davison’s other commitments, with the stories eventually transmitted in January 1983 going into studio in March 1982. JNT’s superiors demurred at this suggestion, but it set in train the idea of The Five Doctors as an off season special. A whole extra story! Hurrah! Which, in the end, merely bumped up the season to normal length, after the loss of the Eric Saward scripted Dalek serial intended as the series finale. Boo.
Whether BBC Drama might have gone for the idea of more Doctor Who in 1982 had JNT raised the idea after the ratings success of January 1982 is an under appreciated "What if?" of Doctor Who history.
In the end, the 90m The Five Doctors was shown on Friday 25th November in the UK, so it could form part of BBC One’s Children in Need telethon. Which is good, as I’d probably not have been allowed to watch it had it gone out when I had school in the morning. It did, though, air on 23rd in America, the first time Doctor Who had been transmitted first anywhere other than the UK. Thankfully there wasn’t an internet.5
Dragonfire (Part One)
By 1987 Doctor Who was being shown on Monday nights at 19:35pm, an unenviable slot that saw it against then ratings juggernaut of Coronation Street where, then BBC One Controller Michael Grade had (he has since admitted) sort of hoped it would die on the vine. (A particularly horrid irony here is that the still-in-the-producer’s-chair-Nathan-Turner loved Coronation Street.) Dragonfire began on 23rd November, becoming the first first-run colour episode of Doctor Who transmitted on that date. Sadly a Blue Peter feature celebrating the series and introducing new companion Ace planned for earlier that day was cancelled. Fans had to content themselves with with collectively thinking it was the best new Doctor Who episode in simply ages, with the story winning the Doctor Who Magazine season poll hands down, in part due to Ace’s debut and a superb performance by Edward Peel as the villain Kane.
We’ll deal with Dragonfire in more detail in the near future, but I need to get something off my chest about Part One. The literal cliffhanger to Part One, where the Doctor climbs down a sheer drop and hangs from a rail by his umbrella has been routinely mocked for decades, and even described as inexplicable. But it’s not. All the information necessary to understand what’s happened is there, it’s just only there visually. The gallery the Doctor is walking along ends in a dead end upwards slope. So he either has to go back or go down. The wide shots of the set show that there’s a ledge that seems to be in reach, but once the Doctor climbs down, he realises he’s misjudged the distance. It’s about twice his height, rather than a little more than it and he can’t just drop down to the ledge, because it’s ice and ice is slippy. Just dropping a metre or so means he’s likely to slide off the ledge.
This is resolved by Glitz climbing down over the Doctor, because their joint height allows him to reach the ledge safely and then he lowers the Doctor down. You can also tell that they have to go down at this point because later Ace and Mel choose to do the same thing, albeit with the help of Ace’s handy travel ladder. This isn’t some wild theory. This is just what happens onscreen, and I saw this with my own eyes in 1987. So you can all stop worrying about it now. You’re welcome.
The next year Doctor Who moved slots again, going to Wednesdays at 19:35. While this was unfortunately still up against Coronation Street, a combination of this rescheduling and a leap year meant that Silver Nemesis Part One was the second new Doctor Who episode to premiere on November 23rd in a years and a day. Given that the episode is set on November 23rd 1988, this is probably for the best.
The story was shot in June, meaning that 23rd November is a baking hot affair, where Ace can sit outside in a T-shirt at the story’s opening. This is very weird, but maybe the comet nemesis is to blame. Or climate change is even worse in the Doctor Who universe. While it doesn’t make up for it, the newspaper Ace is reading has her beloved Charlton Athletic picking up three points (i.e. winning ) in their most recent game, whereas in reality they’d drawn with Wimbledon the previous Saturday. Swings and roundabouts.6
Meanwhile, in echoes of the situation with The Five Doctors five years earlier, viewers in New Zealand got Parts Two and Three straight after Part One, the NZBC screening the whole story that night. While somewhat scorned by fans in retrospect (it came second in the contemporary Doctor Who Magazine and Doctor Who Appreciation Society season polls) Silver Nemesis gained the highest average number of viewers and the highest AI of the entire McCoy era. Which makes it the most successful, if not the best, McCoy story.
Throughout the first Russell T Davies era, Doctor Who ran in the second quarter of the year, meaning no new episodes in November. Ever. Davies later said that when working on Doctor Who he realised the programme’s fiftieth birthday would fall on a Saturday, but while he found that coincidence exciting, he didn’t dare assume the revival would last eight years.
It did, and it was RTD’s successor, Steven Moffat, who was faced with the impossible task of writing and producing a fiftieth anniversary special. While the story largely concentrates itself on celebrating the show’s revived new century self, it also takes things from most of the episodes in the above list. The nods to An Unearthly Child are many and obvious. UNIT appear. So, briefly, do the Cybermen. The Smith / Tennant Doctor relationship seems very much based on the Troughton / Pertwee one, while John Hurt’s staggering guest turn as the previously unknown War Doctor combines Hartnell’s role in that story with Moffat’s conviction that Hartnell’s 1983 stand-in Richard Hurndall’s performance in some ways constituted a whole new, one-off Doctor. Lines from The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors are reprised or paraphrased, and Silver Nemesis contributes the idea that an anniversary story must feature a Gallifreyan super weapon, a Queen Elizabeth and a Doctor wearing a fez.
Somehow, all this is mixed into a complex and emotionally satisfying story that also manages not to neglect the Smith Doctor and Clara, and the impossible was achieved. Because not only was The Day of the Doctor later voted the best Doctor Who story ever by readers of Doctor Who Magazine, it was also the single most watched drama on UK television in the whole of 2013. That’s the impossible with knobs on.
What was sadly impossible in a less glorious sense was getting anything out when 23rd November 2019 was a Saturday. The then production team not only not making a series for 2019, but having moved the show to Sundays anyway. Boo. Better luck next time?
That next time might perhaps come sooner than you think. 23rd November 2024 is a Saturday, and while we don’t yet know what parts of the year Doctor Who will run in. We do know there are plenty of episodes in the can. It would be possible to do what JNT wanted in 1982 and ape 1975, by having spring and autumn runs of Doctor Who. Or even just a one off special a month before the similar for Christmas.
In a recent interview the much anticipated Mr Gatwa let slip that he’s done a scene featuring a clip of William Hartnell.
It couldn’t be, could it?
Which are of course a practical response to not getting William Russell and Jacqueline Hill out of the car set mid scene in a near as-live recording.
Seriously, watch it at the height of summer, it will make you feel cold and damp.
We can’t quite see due to camera angles.
Wogan, 26 September 1986, BBC One, 19:00.
Okay. There was. ARPANET, the US military’s proto-internet, became operational in 1969. But no one used it to talk about Doctor Who spoilers. As far as we know.
1988 was an unusually warm autumn, although not that warm. It was the only time in my school days that we were allowed to continue playing outside on the field, rather than the tarmac playground, into October. I know this because we played Remembrance of the Daleks on the grass.