Notes on Doctor Who and history: ‘The Reign of Terror’

[Apologies for having left this series of posts for a while; my rewatch has rather stalled.]

‘The events will happen just as they are written. I’m afraid so, and we can’t stem the tide. But at least we can stop being carried away with the flood!’

At the beginning of ‘The Sensorites’ (Doctor Who’s first engagement with the future of the human race, and with anything resembling space opera), there’s a conversation amongst the TARDIS crew where they go back over all their previous adventures (though not, as Neil Perryman notes, ‘the weird one with the scissors’). The Doctor and Susan reminisce over an visit to England in the reign of Henry VIII, before Ian and Barbara joined them. This seems to have been a fairly typical adventure; the Doctor and Susan had to get themselves locked up in the Tower of London, because that’s where the TARDIS was, i.e. once again they’d got separated from their ship, and had to find a way of getting back, a plot mechanism that drives every story in Season 1 (except the weird one with the scissors), and indeed drives ‘The Sensorites’ and ‘The Reign of Terror’. But what is interesting is I think that this is the first reference to English history explicitly made in Doctor Who (unless we are to think of ‘An Unearthly Child’ as taking place in what would become England, of which, as I note in a comment I’ve recently made on my discussion of that story, I don’t think we can be sure).

But let us leave behind ‘The Sensorites’, a story that starts trying to do something interesting with the concept of ‘monsters’, but is too long and diffuse. Instead, we turn to a proper treat, ‘The Reign of Terror’. Here we are, on a number of levels, in different territory from the previous historicals. In contrast to the remote (at least to the original viewing audience) locations of ‘Marco Polo’ and ‘The Aztecs’, we are now in Europe. We are not yet in England (or Britain), even though the story begins with the Doctor swearing, over Ian’s scepticism, that they are in Somerset (and in a way the Doctor’s right that they are in England, because France is, as ever, reconstructed in a studio in London and, in an innovation for the series, in the fields of Denham, in Buckinghamshire). We do have our first English characters not from the twentieth century, in the ill-fated Webster and the spy James Stirling (as is often the case, printed sources are inconsistent on whether this should be spelt ‘Stirling’ or ‘Sterling’).* And we are in the French Revolution, specifically summer 1794, at the height of the so-called Reign of Terror. This was a period that was definitely taught in British schools in the 1960s; in the very first episode of Doctor Who, Susan borrows a book on the French Revolution from her teacher, Barbara (in Ian Marter’s novelization of this story, he has Barbara remember Susan borrowing the book in the earlier story; presumably the book is still somewhere in the TARDIS).

The idea of setting a story in the French Revolution was, according to the volume of Doctor Who: The Complete History that covers this (which I don’t have to hand), originally the idea of William Russell. But I strongly suspect that the period was not far from script editor David Whitaker’s mind. After all, Susan’s borrowing of a book on the French Revolution is there in Anthony Coburn’s script for the first episode, and expanded upon in the remount (as discussed below)—a scene I expect derives from Whitaker rather than Coburn. 

Early on in this story, Susan tells Ian and Barbara that the Reign of Terror (and specifically the Reign of Terror, not just the French Revolution in general) is her grandfather’s favourite period of history (Marter has the Doctor repeat this to a French peasant boy). We can well believe it. We know that the Doctor has been here before; when Susan borrows that book on the French Revolution, her first response is ‘that’s not right’. Clearly, we are meant to infer from that, at least in hindsight, that the Doctor and Susan have already visited this period of Earth’s history. In the first novel, Doctor Who and the Daleks, David Whitaker expands on this; Barbara recalls a thirty-page essay Susan wrote on Robespierre that included details of his walks and his clothes. One wonders, if Whitaker had actually written this story, whether it might have turned out that Robespierre already knew the Doctor and Susan, which might have smoothed their way, or caused a lot more problems. One also wonders exactly what it was that appealed to the Doctor about a period where the wrong word to the wrong person could get your head rapidly separated from your body (in Marter’s novel, the Doctor mourns that he has missed the Storming of the Bastille, something he always enjoys—but which, of course, belongs to a much earlier phase of the Revolution).

One suspects that Whitaker might have wanted to write this story (Simon Guerrier’s forthcoming biography of Whitaker may have something to say about this). For quite a while, Whitaker had intended writing the final historical of the first season, at first planning a story set in the aftermath of the Spanish Armada; but, in keeping with Whitaker’s instincts to avoid obvious British history, the story was to be set in Spain, looking at what the defeat of the Armada meant to the Spanish, a topic rarely treated in English classrooms. But it became obvious that, with the work he needed to do script-editing and rewriting the other stories, there simply wasn't time for Whitaker to write the final story himself, and he would have to get someone else in. Enter Dennis Spooner, a friend of Terry Nation, who had not written for Doctor Who before, but was an experienced television writer, having written for The Avengers and Fireball XL5, among others.

Evidently, Whitaker decided he was going to keep the Spanish Armada story for himself, and it was deferred to Whitaker’s outline for the second season, along with a number of other suggestions, for stories in Ancient Egypt, the American Civil War, and the Roman empire, of which only the last came to fruition. (I suspect Whitaker may have already decided in his own mind—if not actually told anyone else of his decision—that he was going to move on from the script-editor’s role at the end of the first production block, and so would have more time for writing episodes.) So, with the Armada held over, Spooner would have to write in a different setting. According to Spooner (who actually wanted to write a science fiction story, but like any jobbing writer, did the job he was given, which on this occasion, was a historical), he was given a choice of four subjects, from which he eventually chose the French Revolution, after discussions with Whitaker and producer Verity Lambert. David Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker rather imply in The First Doctor Handbook that the setting had already been decided upon before Whitaker met Spooner, but that may be the result of compression in their account.

The important point is that Spooner had a different approach to the historicals from that practised by Whitaker and John Lucarotti. In a chapter I wrote over a decade ago,† I characterised this as the difference between being concerned with history, and being concerned with story. Lucarotti’s two scripts so far are very concerned with getting the historical details right; the plot rather emerged from a consideration of the history. Spooner, on the other hand, was most influenced by earlier fictional depictions of the period that he was writing about. The biggest influences on ‘The Reign of Terror’ are Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (from the most recent—1957—BBC adaptation of which the Doctor Who serial borrows a shot of the guillotine, and probably some costumes, though to the audience the novel would be most familiar from the 1958 movie starring Dirk Bogarde), and Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, rather than Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. One consequence of this is Spooner’s desire to put the most famous person about at the time, Napoleon Bonaparte, into the story, despite the facts, as the Napoleon I Society pointed out after broadcast, that not only was Napoleon unlikely to have supported an attempt to overthrow Robespierre, he was nowhere near Paris at the time of Robespierre’s fall. (By the time of Jon Pertwee, of course, it will turn out that the Doctor and Napoleon were friends.)

Spooner also has rather more humour on display than pervious historicals, though here Spooner’s instincts are somewhat moderated by Whitaker’s script-editing. Spooner would be completely given his head in the next historical, ‘The Romans’, by which time Spooner had taken over Whitaker’s role as script-editor. Of course, from the humour perspective, it’s not Spooner’s fault if, three years later, the Carry On team brought out a far funnier pastiche of Orczy in Don’t Lose Your Head, though inevitably it shapes how we see this Doctor Who story now (as I was writing this piece, I initially typed ‘Scarlet Fingernail’).‡

Spooner’s adapts well to a fundamental problem the story has to confront: on a BBC budget, there was simply no way that they could have crowd scenes around the guillotine, even the fairly limited ones that characterise the 1958 movie (and, indeed, Don’t Lose Your Head). So almost everything takes place inside rooms, particularly at the Conciergerie prison. This is fleshed out with a few small, tightly shot street scenes, the footage from the 1957 Tale of Two Cities showing the guillotine falling, and some footage from an educational film, The French Revolution, showing a horse-drawn carriage riding through forest, which is used (twice; the second time reversed) for the TARDIS crew’s journey from Paris back to the countryside where their ship is. 

Other points to note: This is a story replete with recalling previous adventures, with callbacks to the likes of ‘An Unearthly Child’ (though not the weird one with the scissors), amid a sense that maybe the TARDIS crew’s luck may really be about to run out this time. (As a side note, if people watching were aware that this marked the end of the first season of Doctor Who, they might have perceived there being a very real possibility that Ian and Barbara, or even Susan, might depart in this story, possibly not surviving it.) We get Barbara as history teacher again, lecturing everyone about how, no matter how bad Robespierre and his Jacobins and the Reign of Terror are, the royalist government that existed before the Revolution was also pretty awful, and deserved to be overthrown, good people supported the Revolution, and good things would come of it. Such nuance is not always a feature of Doctor Who. We also get, once again, Everybody Fancies Barbara, Especially the Villains. And as the text commentary on the DVD notes, this story sees the introduction of a feature that will be maintained in later historicals: regional English accents indicate working class characters, Received Pronunciation means upper class. 

And once again, the nature of the TARDIS crew’s involvement with history is addressed. Barbara tries to tell James Stirling that Napoleon will indeed turn Revolutionary France into a military dictatorship. The Doctor tells her not to waste her breath. She says that she’s learnt that history can’t be changed from her time amongst the Aztecs. The Doctor replies with the words quoted at the top of this post. Then, at the end of the episode, back in the TARDIS, there’s a conversation, slightly trimmed from what was in the original script, about what might have happened had they told Napoleon what was going to happen to him, or tried to shoot him. The Doctor is insistent that nothing they could have done would have made a difference. This last scene in particular feels more like Whitaker than Spooner; it echoes a lot of the themes in the prologue Whitaker wrote for Doctor Who and the Crusaders, which I’ll discuss when I get round to ‘The Crusade’. (In a way, this view will be reinforced by 'Vincent and the Doctor', where the message is that you can show someone's future to them, and be believed, and yet still history will play out as written.)** 

In the next story, ‘Planet of Giants’, the TARDIS crew actually manages to return to London in 1964, but have been shrunk to about an inch high (they also find themselves embroiled in a rather poor Avengers plot). But along the way, the Doctor reveals that he was in London during the Zeppelin raids of the First World War.

Finally on this general topic, I rediscovered a piece that I’d written on Doctor Who and history for the Open University’s OpenLearn site. I had quite forgotten about this. I think it’s still a sound discussion of the issues, though, as this post suggests, I would move the change in emphasis of the historicals forward from ‘The Romans’ to ‘The Reign of Terror’.

* And please tell me that someone has written a story around the fact that Stirling’s alias here, ‘Lemaitre’, is the French for ‘Master’.

† ‘It’s about Tempus: Greece and Rome in “classic” Doctor Who’, in David C. Wright, Jr. and Allan W. Austin (eds), Space and Time: Essays on Visions of History in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2010, pp. 100-115.

‡ Carry On director Gerald Thomas was also, at least partially, sending up his brother Ralph’s 1958 version of A Tale of Two Cities.

** The theme is, of course, also taken up in Marter’s novel: ‘it was immensely frustrating [for Ian] to be able to see into the future and yet not be able to do anything to change it!’

Notes on Doctor Who and history: 'The Aztecs'

‘But you can’t rewrite history! Not one line! ... Barbara, one last appeal. What you are trying to do is utterly impossible. I know, believe me, I know.’

‘The Aztecs’ is the big one in terms of how early Doctor Who views history, as embodied in that quote. John Lucarotti returns as writer, following up a period in which he was interested, having lived in Mexico. So the research is, once again, very solid.

Barbara wants to change the Aztecs, to get them to give up what she considers ‘evil’ in their culture. The Doctor, in the quotation above, insists that you just can’t change history like that, implying perhaps in his last comment that he himself has tried and failed. Although, strangely, he later tells Cameca, the Aztec woman to whom he has accidentally become engaged, that the gods wish an end to human sacrifice, thus indulging in a bit of the attempting to change history that he has told Barbara she should give up.

Eventually, Barbara is persuaded; indeed, she gives up surprisingly easily, once Ian convinces her that Tlotoxol, the High Priest of Sacrifice, represents mainstream Aztec opinion, rather than Autloc, High Priest of Knowledge. This is probably good, because in the end Barbara’s plan is essentially a white saviour narrative. But while she can’t change the Aztecs, she can change one man, Autloc. This is the ‘wiggle room’ that Doctor Who will exploit time and time again.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is still not a moral crusader. His sole objective is get back the the TARDIS, from which he has, once again, been separated. At the same time, he clearly feels some responsibility not to muck things up. It is interesting how very dedicated he is to this. The Doctor’s attitude to how to behave while in fifteenth-century Mexico is an extreme version of Star Trek’s Prime Directive. Not only must he and his companions sit back and accept human sacrifice, they must actively participate if circumstances dictate. It is hard to imagine any other Doctor taking so extreme an attitude.

Barbara is history teacher supreme again, with a detailed knowledge of the Aztecs. (Meanwhile, Ian reveals hidden l33t fighting skills.) And the costumes and set design excel again, making the most of the studio bound restrictions.

Once again, Aztec Mexico is an interesting choice for a setting. Even more so than ‘Marco Polo’, the setting is devoid of white Europeans (well, if we ignore all the white European actors portraying the Aztecs). This is not a setting that would commonly come up in an educational context, or a televisual one. And having decided to choose the Aztecs, the show takes an unusual angle on them. Most dramas about the Aztecs would have chosen to look at the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores. In Doctor Who, the fact that they will come drives Barbara’s actions, but they do not appear, not do any of the Aztecs have the slightest idea of what is about to happen to their world.  

Again, there is excellent design and costume work, even though designer Barry Newbery apparently found reference material hard to find, and costume designer Daphne Dare had to get around the fact that historical evidence suggests that male Aztecs often wore little more than loincloths, and Aztec women went around topless.

One last point: I find it extremely interesting that ‘The Aztecs’ was in production at almost exactly the same time as Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun was in rehearsal for the Chichester Festival. Of course, Shaffer’s play is about the Incas, not the Aztecs, and includes the conquistadores. I have no idea if anyone involved in Doctor Who was aware of the National Theatre production, though it’s entirely possible that they did, as members of the cast of ‘The Aztecs’ may well have auditioned for Royal Hunt. In any case, I find the coincidence of two productions about pre-Colombian American cultures interesting.

Notes on Doctor Who and History: ‘The Keys of Marinus'

‘Wait a minute,’ I hear you say, ‘“The Keys of Marinus” is a science fiction story, set on an alien planet, not in Earth’s history.’ Well, yes, that’s true, but there’s quite a lot here that relates to the show’s engagement with human history.

First of all, there’s the references. Barbara the history teacher is in action again, comparing the building they find on Marinus with the pyramids of Egypt and pre-Colombian America. (In his novelisation, Philip Hinchcliffe, in a somewhat sexist and implausible move, takes that line away from Barbara and gives it to Ian.) And we have the first occasion when the Doctor name-drops some historical character he’s met, in this case the somewhat obscure fourth/third-century BCE Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis. This sort of name-dropping will be taken to extremes in the Pertwee years.

And then there is the way in which the various locations of Marinus draw heavily, and not particularly subtly, on historical cultures. Morphoton, at least in its mirage form, looks like a Roman palace, with luxurious food and clothing all around. The next location feels more medieval, though with some classical-looking statues. The snow-and-ice covered location visited in episode 4, with its heavily armoured knights (shown), seems even more medieval, and harks back to Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (though now it looks more like Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Millennius feels rather like something out of Franz Kafka.

It is perhaps appropriate here to talk about Terry Nation’s planned ‘The Red Fort’. Replaced either by this, or by ‘The Reign of Terror’, or by ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, depending on which version you believe, the story was set in India, in the period of the British Raj. The Red Fort itself was (and is) a monument in Old Delhi, built as a palace for the Mughal emperors. In 1803 the East India Company took possession of the Fort after defeating the Maratha Empire, and one possibility, as Christopher Morley suggests, is that the story concerned these events. However, the Red Fort was occupied in 1857 by the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah II, at the time of what was known in 1963 as the Indian Mutiny; documentation that exists makes it clear that this was the setting for Nation’s story. The story is one that concerned the British empire, and would have been the first British history story that the show had made. But this is still a relatively obscure part of British history, compared to others that could have been chosen. Unlike other lost stories, the scripts have never been published, and it may be that Nation never wrote much of them. One suspects that, whilst it might have been critical of certain members of the East India Company, it probably would not have overtly criticised the idea of British rule in India - that sort of anti-colonial material was some way off for Who. It might have been very controversial, given the South Asian population in the UK at the time (who presumably would not have been cast in main roles). Perhaps we are better off without this story.

Notes on Doctor Who and history: ‘Marco Polo’

(I’ve fallen behind on my Doctor Who rewatch, but I’m going to try to get back on track, and will have some more of these posts.)

And so we come to Doctor Who’s first proper historical, ‘proper’ in that it was actually set in history rather than prehistory, as had been the case for the last three episodes of ‘An Unearthly Child’. 

It’s sometimes said (though generally by people whose knowledge of the show is fairly casual) that Doctor Who in its early days chose periods for its historicals based on what was being taught in schools, or on what could most easily be catered for out of the BBC costumes and props stores. Neither theory really stands up in the light of what Doctor Who actually broadcast in terms of historicals in its first two years. If either notion held true, then there ought to have been a different set of historical periods visited.

I haven’t done too much research into what was being taught in history classes in schools in the early 1960s, and I suspect that, in those pre-National Curriculum days, there was quite a lot of variety. But it seems likely to me that a lot of it centred around Our Island Story, the sort of history satirised in 1066 and All That. This was a history that took pupils through Roman Britain, the Anglo-Saxon settlement, the Norman Conquest, Tudors and Stuarts, the Industrial Revolution, and the British Empire. Doctor Who, at least in its first year, had none of this. Only in the last historical of the first season was a period shown that might have been taught widely in British schools, and then it was the French Revolution. Not until 1965 did the first English king appear, Richard I in ‘The Crusade’, and even when English and British history did feature, it did not dominate the historical periods the show visited until the era of John Nathan-Turner (1980–1989). True, there had been a plan to do a Roman Britain story in the first season; but that was in the event never made, and in any case, it focussed upon the end of Roman Britain, rather than more obvious events such as the invasion of Julius Caesar or the Boudican revolt.

As for the BBC and its stores, the Beeb had produced a number of costume dramas through the 1950s and early 1960s, though its glory days in this area still lay in the future. The backbone of the classic serial at this time, as it continued to be later, was the nineteenth-century novel, primarily Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, but also William Makepeace Thackeray (Thomas Hardy and Anthony Trollope would follow later). Additionally, the BBC had made The Age of Kings, adapting Shakespeare’s history plays. If the BBC were out to save money on Doctor Who, one might expect the periods depicted in these programmes to be represented in the show’s output. But again, they’re not. The Doctor didn’t visit the nineteenth century until one episode of ‘The Chase’ in 1965, and then not again until ‘Evil of the Daleks’ in 1967. 

The period most commonly represented on television in the early 1960s, largely through broadcasts of movies, was the Second World War. This is a topic Doctor Who steered well clear of, at least in terms of direct reference, until the Master dropped a doodlebug on UNIT in ‘The Time Monster’ (1972). (This is not the place to discuss the role of the Second World War in shaping various aspects of the show; I discuss one element of that in ‘“Went the Day of the Daleks well?” An investigation into the role of invasion narratives in shaping 1950s and 1960s British television Science Fiction, as shown in Quatermass, Doctor Who and UFO’.) It is of course perfectly possible, perhaps even likely, that some of the costumes for ‘The Reign of Terror’ had previously been used in the BBC’s 1957 production of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities; but it seems likely that the production team chose a period and then went to see what was available in stores, rather than deciding the setting on the basis of the BBC’s holdings.  

If anything, Doctor Who seems to have deliberately gone out of its way to showcase historical periods that would not be familiar to the viewers, either from other television programmes or from their education. David Whitaker, indeed, was explicit about this, at least in terms of not duplicating other television (in a 1963 memo quoted by James Chapman, Inside the TARDIS, p. 22). Part of this may have been a desire not to turn the historicals into something that felt too much like work to schoolchildren watching. It is interesting to note the list of potential subjects that John Crockett, a staff director with the BBC, put together in 1963, as he was preparing to direct one episode of ‘Marco Polo’ (he later directed all four episodes of ‘The Aztecs’). This was sent to David Whitaker, and is quoted by Chapman (Inside the TARDIS, p. 224). They are mostly British-based, with such topics as the Peasants' Revolt, the Spanish Armada, and Boadicea (i.e. Boudica), but Crockett also included such topics as the fall of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. Only four of the settings Crockett put forward were actually taken up by the show, and none of those before 1965. Whitaker evidently had other ideas.

‘Marco Polo’ is a case in point. Gavin Burrows of Lucid Frenzy Junior (who likes this story considerably less than I do, though his post on the story is very insightful) has said to me that the early historicals were often the opposition of educational, setting out to reinforce audience prejudices. You can make that argument for the portrayal of the Stone Age in ‘An Unearthly Child’, and it’s certainly the case for some of the later historicals, as I’ll discuss in later posts in this series. But I'm not sure if it’s true for the carefully-researched stories of John Lucarotti, who penned this Doctor Who serial (and Gav agrees). 

For their first true historical, the production team chose not the nineteenth century, or any period of British history, but the story of a medieval Italian who had ended up on the other side of the world. The BBC had made a radio serial in 1955 called The Three Journeys of  Marco Polo, written by John Lucarotti. But as far as I am aware, no television version of his story had been made by the BBC. Nor was he likely to be studied in any depth at school. No doubt Marco Polo was familiar to the audience as a name, perhaps through magazine articles or the occasional television feature, with a vague understanding of what he had done. But he would not have been as well-known a figure as Sir Francis Drake or Richard the Lionheart; hence there is a conversation in an early episode in which he establishes his backstory for the benefit of viewers. 

Doctor Who deliberately chose to take the viewer to a non-European setting, to thirteenth-century China, albeit with a European as chief mediator of that world for the Doctor and his companions. Of course, being the BBC of the early 1960s, this is a China populated by British and European actors made up to look Chinese, with half-Burmese Zienia Merton being the only actual speaking Asian on set.

Barbara the history teacher really comes to the fore here. It is Barbara who recognises Polo, and is able to supply her companions with a few useful pointers about his background. However, she clearly doesn’t know everything, and other characters such as Polo and Ping-Cho (Merton), are needed to further the knowledge available. The background to the assassins whom the travellers will encounter, for example, is provided in a story told by Ping-Cho, further commented on by Polo. (Ian, meanwhile, parallels Barbara by giving science lessons about condensation and the like; but somehow Ian’s lessons come across as much more irritating.)

The standard format for a historical, or indeed any, story of early Who is that the TARDIS and its crew arrive in a setting. Complications then ensue, usually involving the crew being separated from the TARDIS; when the Doctor was less of a moral crusader, such a separation was necessary to prevent him just dropping back into the TARDIS and flying off. From these complications our travellers must extricate themselves by the story’s end. ‘Marco Polo’ sort of follows that format, except for two things. Firstly, as Gav says, the TARDIS (from which the Doctor is only separated for part of the story; for the rest he can't leave because it is broken) is the McGuffin that drives the story; and secondly, ‘Marco Polo’ looks at the format from the other side. Instead of being centred around the Doctor, the story revolves around Marco Polo himself (Mark Eden), and how he deals with the complications and opportunities that the TARDIS crew bring in; this is perhaps why the story came to be called ‘Marco Polo’, rather than its original title of ‘Journey to Cathay’.* It is Polo who delivers bridging narration (this is a story that takes place over a longer period than is typical for historicals), and it's entirely appropriate to the structure of the story that Polo gets the final line, after the TARDIS has left. Polo is even the one who got the Radio Times cover (along with the Doctor and Derren Nesbit’s Mongol warlord Tegana), the show’s first. (One wonders if the story would have felt quite the same had illness not kept William Hartnell mostly out of the second episode.)

One final point to make about ‘Marco Polo’ is the lavish set design (by Barry Newbery) and costumes, almost all of them specially made for this serial. Those of us who watched Doctor Who in the 1980s will remember it as a period when the BBC seemed almost embarrassed to be making the show. This was not the case in 1964. ‘Marco Polo’ may not have been a Classic Serial, but it was treated as if it were, and made with exactly the same level of attention to detail.

(A sidenote: I have not yet done more than skimmed Dene October’s Black Archive volume on ‘Marco Polo’, but it's there on my TBR pile.)     

* One must be careful not to read too much into this, however; overall story titles at this point were not broadcast, and were primarily for production staff; as a consequence, they tend to be descriptive. Titles for stories before overall story titles started being used onscreen (which began with ‘The Savages’ in 1966) did not really become fixed until the 1970s (hence the multiple different titles in circulation for ‘The Daleks’).

Notes on Doctor Who and history: 'An Unearthly Child'

One of the projects I was thinking about several years ago but never quite got round to was a book on how Doctor Who engages with human history, on which I planned to work with a couple of other scholars who have interests in that area. As I'm doing a rewatch of the show at the moment, I thought it was worth jotting down a few notes.

As is well-known, the format for Doctor Who was to alternate stories set in human history, and science fiction stories. (Script editor David Whitaker originally conceived of a third category, 'sideways' stories, but there are few examples of that, with only 'The Edge of Destruction' and 'Planet of Giants' being plausible candidates, and it's clear that this category soon got subsumed into the more general sf stories.) These two strands are represented by the audience's viewpoint characters, the science teacher Ian Chesterton (William Russell), and the history teacher Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill). Both take an interest in Susan Foreman because she is a prodigy in both subjects. (In Whitaker's novelisation Doctor Who and the Daleks, he adds some nuance here, making Susan very good at some historical periods, but dreadfully ignorant of other events, such as the Spanish Armada.) This is reinforced by Susan reading a book on the French Revolution, in which she spots an error (a scene, incidentally, not in the original pilot). In retrospect, we are meant to realise that she identifies this error through her personal experience.

When we finally enter the TARDIS control room in the first episode, it is a mixture of the advanced and the antique. The control console, and the walls, are a science fictional mise-en-scène, but scattered around the control room are various antique objects: a clock, a tripod of birds (Whitaker talks of a bust of Napoleon). The number of these objects in the TARDIS declined as the years went on.

In the next episode, 'The Cave of Skulls', Susan talks about the TARDIS appearing as an Ionic column or a sedan chair, both antique objects.

More importantly, the remaining three episodes of the story include the first shown trip into Earth's past, to the Stone Age. In The Television Companion, David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker say that it is not necessarily the Stone Age of Earth depicted, as this is never established on screen; but if a planet is presented that looks like Stone Age Earth, it is probably safe to assume that it is Stone Age Earth, until someone says otherwise. That this story is a historical is suggested by its being immediately followed by an sf story, 'The Daleks', and the alternative title of '100,000 BC' also suggests that someone thought the story was set on Earth (though it's not clear when it acquired this alternative title). Indeed, no-one else involved in the production of the show has ever suggested that it isn't Earth, so the idea that it isn't can be discarded. 

That said, it's a risky strategy for the first historical to be actually a prehistorical. There's a sense that what we are getting is more common assumptions about Stone Age humans (living in caves, dress in skins) rather than anything based on actual research into the Middle Paleolithic (as professional paleontologists recognised at the time). And everyone is portrayed by RADA-educated actors talking about themselves in the third person because that sounds 'primitive'.