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  Donald Baverstock, the BBC Controller of Programmes, met with Newman in March 1963 to discuss the need for a new show to fill an early-evening scheduling gap between the live afternoon sports programme Grandstand and the pop-music review show Juke Box Jury, which led into the prime-time Saturday evening schedule. The slot had been previously filled by a variety of short-lived shows and serials, including a Francis Durbridge thriller, a six-episode sciencefiction serial The Big Pool and comedy series The Telegoons. Newman and Baverstock wanted a new drama show for the slot, something that could potentially run all year round (with short seasonal breaks) and could attract a loyal family audience, keeping the older Grandstand viewers tuned in, yet also appealing to the younger, hipper audience attracted to Juke Box Jury. Newman proposed and considered a variety of ideas, including a drama set in a boys’ school.

  However, for as long as he could recall, Newman had been a fan of literary science fiction. ‘Up to the age of 40, I don’t think there was a science-fiction book I hadn’t read,’ he claimed. ‘I love them because they’re a marvellous way – and a safe way, I might add – of saying nasty things about our own society.’ Newman was aware of, and embraced, science fiction’s ability to comment on contemporary politics and society in the disguise of fiction about the future. While at ABC he’d commissioned the science-fiction drama-anthology series Out of This World, as well as the serial Pathfinders in Space and two sequels, Pathfinders to Mars and Pathfinders to Venus. The Pathfinders shows featured juvenile characters as a point of identification for the younger target audience and were co-created by Malcolm Hulke, later a key, politically motivated contributor to Doctor Who. Introduced by classic-horror-film icon Boris Karloff, Out of This World dramatised the work of key science-fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, John Wyndham and Philip K Dick, whose Impostor was adapted by screenwriter Terry Nation, later to create the Daleks for Doctor Who. These previous Sydney Newman shows combined elements that would be central to Doctor Who: an anthology-series format, with strong ‘audience identification’ characters (as the BBC described them) carrying forward from story to story.

  Newman’s interest in science fiction was fundamental to his thoughts on filling the Saturday scheduling gap, but the BBC had already been actively investigating the possibility of developing a series of literary science-fiction adaptations since early 1962. Always on the lookout for material to adapt, especially literary material, the BBC had an in-house ‘survey group’ that monitored film, radio and theatre productions for material that might be of use to television. Donald Wilson, then running the BBC’s script department, and Head of Light Entertainment Eric Maschwitz commissioned a report on literary science fiction that might be suitable for television adaptation. The report, compiled by drama script editors Donald Bull and Alice Frick, was submitted in April 1962. The pair had read and evaluated a selection of then-current science-fiction novels and short-story anthologies, and had met with some authors, including Brian Aldiss. The report labelled the genre as particularly American and ideas-based rather than rooted in character. Various sub-genres were identified, from simple thriller plots, to technology-driven narratives and ‘big ideas’ like cosmic threats to mankind and cosmic disasters. Interestingly, one of the sub-genres identified was described as ‘satire, comic or horrific, extrapolating current social trends and techniques’, a description that could be applied to much of Doctor Who’s output over the next 45 years. This was key to Newman’s belief that science fiction was a worthwhile genre.

  Previous significant science-fiction ventures by the BBC had included the 1950s Quatermass serials (Quatermass, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit) by Nigel Kneale and the two Andromeda serials (A For Andromeda in 1961 and The Andromeda Breakthrough, broadcast in 1962); these both fell into the ‘cosmic threat to mankind’ sub-genre the BBC report had identified. The report suggested that ideas-driven narratives were not enough; to succeed, a new television drama would have to attach the ‘magic’ of its science-fiction content to ‘a current human situation’. Also, ‘identification must be offered with identifiable human beings’. This remit would be closely followed into the twenty-first-century version of the show.

  Frick and her drama-department colleague John Braybon were asked to investigate the subject matter further in a second report itemising specific literary science-fiction titles the BBC could adapt. By July 1962, the pair had devised some rules for TV science fiction that might appeal to the BBC and had some definite suggestions of stories to be adapted. The ‘rules’ were simple: no bug-eyed monsters; no ‘tin robot’ central characters; no ‘large and elaborate’ settings, such as spaceship interiors or alien planets. They must feature ‘genuine characterisation’ and rely on the audience having to ‘suspend disbelief on one fact only’. Frick and Braybon settled on stories dealing with telepaths or time travel as being most suited to adaptation to television on an inevitably limited BBC budget. They described the time-travel concept as ‘particularly attractive as a series, since individual plots can easily be tackled by a variety of scriptwriters. It’s the Z-Cars of science fiction’.

  The stories listed in this second report that were considered suitable for adapting were time-travel adventure Guardians of Time by Poul Anderson, alien-invasion drama Three to Conquer by Eric Frank Russell, immortality tale Eternity Lost by Clifford Simak, trick story Pictures Don’t Lie by Catherine McLean (aliens invade in tiny ships and drown in a puddle, later satirised by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), a Frankenstein-type tale No Woman Born by CL Moore, the humorous The Cerebrative Psittacoid by H Nearing Jr and a story of adventure and exploration, The Ruum by Arthur Forges.

  Sydney Newman’s own interest in science fiction, combined with the 1962 reports, which Baverstock and Donald Wilson brought to his attention, resulted in him issuing a brief to the drama department. He requested that they develop a full proposal for a science-fiction anthology series, consisting of a number of self-contained, short serials, to run for 52 weeks of the year, to fill the early-evening Saturday slot. The development of Doctor Who had begun.

  Responding to Sydney Newman’s directive, Baverstock and Wilson put together a committee to build upon the survey group’s 1962 findings and develop a proposal for the Saturday-early-evening, sciencefiction, family show. At the initial meeting on 26 March 1963 were Wilson, two of the authors of the 1962 report, Alice Frick and John Braybon, and script-department adapter Cecil Edwin Webber. According to Frick’s notes of the meeting, Wilson suggested a series based around a time-travelling machine and those who used it. Crucially, Wilson maintained that the machine should not only travel forwards and backwards in time, but also into space and even ‘sideways’ into matter itself (suggesting other dimensions). Frick herself preferred the idea of a ‘flying saucer’ vehicle, very in vogue since the phrase was coined following US pilot Kenneth Arnold’s sightings of 1947. She felt the saucer would be a better ship as it could contain a group of people, unlike (she assumed) a time machine that, in the style of HG Wells’ time traveller in his novel The Time Machine, would only allow an individual to travel. Wilson wanted the new show to steer clear of anything computer-related, as this had featured quite heavily in the BBC’s recent Andromeda serials. The telepathy idea from the original report was reconsidered, but not thought to be central to any possible series. Braybon suggested basing a future-set series around a group of scientific trouble-shooters who would investigate rogue science and scientists (this idea would later surface in slightly different form on the BBC in the 1970s as Doomwatch and in the twenty-first century as US TV show Fringe). Each individual serial within the overall series could be devoted to exploring the impact of a single scientific idea, suggested Braybon.

  In developing a format for the proposed early-evening series, Wilson explained that the show must be built around a central group of continuing characters. Different members of the group could come to prominence in different serials, with others dropping into the background (a ve
ry modern drama structure now followed by soaps and TV drama). He felt that, in order to ensure the younger audience tuned in, at least two of the characters should be teenagers, while Frick felt that the teen audience would prefer to watch characters slightly older than themselves, possibly in their 20s. Two key problems were identified: how would the group be exposed to ‘wildly differing’ adventures and how would they be transported to the different settings and environments that the serial nature of the show dictated? CE Webber was tasked with coming up with a cast of characters who could form the central group that would feature in the series.

  Within the core of the subjects discussed at this meeting are the roots of Doctor Who as it would eventually come to the TV screen in November 1963, but the specifics were lacking. The committee approach, building on the previous work, came up with the idea of a group of characters travelling through time and space in a vehicle of some sort and enjoying/enduring a variety of different adventures each week. The task now would be to add the detail of the characters and pin down some of the specifics of the concept. Webber’s subsequent character notes suggested a ‘handsome young man hero’, a ‘well-dressed heroine aged about 30’, and a ‘maturer man with a character twist’. Webber’s notes also went on to explore in more detail the scientific-trouble-shooters concept.

  In April 1963, the notes from these meetings were given to Sydney Newman, who promptly annotated them in his regular brusque manner. He discounted the idea of a flying-saucer vehicle, and next to the trouble-shooters concept he simply scribbled a curt: ‘No.’ Next to Webber’s character list he added: ‘Need a kid to get into trouble, make mistakes.’ Newman approved of Wilson’s time-space machine idea and added that the show should be more like the exciting 1930s and 1940s cinema adventure serials than the old-fashioned and worthy traditional BBC children’s dramas. Newman latched on to Webber’s older man character, suggesting he should be older than the suggested 35–40, perhaps a frail, grumpy old man who has stolen the time-space machine from his own people. Perhaps he could come from an advanced civilisation on a faraway planet? This character would be called ‘the Doctor’. In this synthesis of the survey group’s ideas with his own off-the-cuff inspiration and his knowledge of socially relevant literary science fiction, Sydney Newman had devised the flexible and lasting concept of Doctor Who.

  In May 1963, BBC staff director/producer Rex Tucker was appointed as a caretaker producer for the as-yet-unnamed new programme until Sydney Newman could find a permanent producer for his slowly gestating Saturday-series idea. Tucker brought a recently hired, young and enthusiastic TV director, Richard Martin, to the show, but he intended to direct the first episodes himself. In the summer of 1963, while the BBC bureaucracy prepared for the forthcoming show by allocating studio space at BBC Lime Grove and booking facilities personnel, the creative work in devising the series was still being done. Based on further meetings, Webber drafted a formal format document for the series, accepting Newman’s cliff-hanger serial idea by describing each subsequent 25-minute episode as starting by ‘repeating the closing sequence or final climax of the preceding episode’. A ‘moderate’ budget would be available, but the show should use ‘repeatable sets’ where possible and potential writers should not be afraid of calling for ‘special effects to achieve the element of surprise essential in these stories’.

  The characters who were to go on the adventures had been further refined and now had names and character traits. They were Biddy, a ‘with it’ 15-year-old; Miss Lola McGovern, a 24-year-old schoolmistress at Biddy’s school; and Cliff, a ‘strong and courageous’ schoolmaster of 27 or 28. Newman’s now central ‘old man’ character had become the Doctor, ‘a frail old man lost in time and space’. His ‘name’ has been given to him by the others as they don’t really know who he is. Webber’s character description gave this draft Doctor a form of amnesia: ‘He seems not to remember where he has come from; he is suspicious and capable of sudden malignancy; he seems to have some undefined enemy; he is searching for something as well as fleeing from something. He has a machine which enables them to travel together through time, through space, and through matter.’

  Webber wanted writers of subsequent serials to explore the ‘mystery’ of who the Doctor was, with no one single explanation necessarily being definitive. He did, however, provide two ‘secrets’ that the series could reveal when the time was right. The Doctor had stolen the time-space machine when he fled from his own people, having ‘opted out’ as he objected to their ongoing scientific progress (later seen as reflecting the growing 1960s ‘hippie’ pop culture of ‘tuning in and dropping out’ from society). Casting the rebel Doctor as the ultimate conservative, though, Webber mentions his ‘hatred of scientists, inventors, improvers. He malignantly tries to stop progress (the future) wherever he finds it, while searching for his ideal (the past)’. The second secret had the Doctor’s own people in pursuit of him, out to stop him ‘monkeying with time, because his secret intention is to destroy or nullify the future’. In drafting this document, Webber became Doctor Who’s second godfather, adding the essential mystery element (who is the Doctor?) and developing the backstory that he stole his time-space machine and is on the run from his own people.

  As before, the document went to Sydney Newman for review. Accepting the parts he’d suggested, Newman violently objected to Webber’s detailed characterisation of the Doctor, writing on the document that the Doctor should be ‘a kind of father figure. I don’t want him to be a reactionary!’ While this Doctor’s desire to fight the future and retreat into the past might have reflected Webber’s political feelings, it certainly didn’t chime with Newman, or his project of trying to drag the BBC – through its drama productions – into the soon-to-be-swinging, anti-reactionary, positively progressive 1960s. Against the paragraph outlining the Doctor’s mission to ‘nullify the future’, Newman bluntly scribbled ‘Nuts!’ In nixing this character idea, Newman probably saved the nascent series from a short, ignominious run. The Doctor’s accepting, tolerant and open character would be a large part of the series’ ongoing success with subsequent generations, regardless of the actor playing the role at any given time. It would be the one core element of the character that remained unchanged.

  Under Newman’s direction the character of the Doctor was revised to become a scientist figure, albeit of the amateur, self-educated variety. He was old, maybe 650 according to one document, and occasionally forgetful, tetchy and selfish, but he was not to be evil. He was to be a positive force for good, an autodidact always open to learning something new, while being immensely knowledgeable. Although the other characters might be suspicious of him and his motives initially, they would all eventually become trusted friends and allies. This was, after all, intended as a Saturday early-evening TV serial aimed at a family audience: the central character couldn’t be too much of an antihero, even in the 1960s. The character had now been dubbed ‘Dr Who’, reflecting his unknowable nature. There is an echo of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo in the naming of the character, with Nemo being Latin for ‘no one’. There is some dispute as to whether Tucker or Newman came up with the new name, but it stuck, attached as it was to all the various revisions of the character description. Eventually, the central character’s ‘name’ would become the title of the show, in the fuller form of Doctor Who.

  As 1963 progressed, attention within the BBC drama department turned to the detailed nature of the Doctor’s time-space machine. With a flying-saucer-type vehicle having been roundly rejected by Newman, Wilson and the team developing Doctor Who had to think of something else. Much of the basic time-travel concept of the series had come from a literary classic very familiar to post-war British readers: HG Wells’ The Time Machine. The problem with the type of time machine featured in Wells’ philosophical social satire was that, built as it was around an Edwardian saddle, it could only comfortably carry one passenger at a time. How would the Doctor and his several friends travel through time if only one of them could sit
down and the others had to hang on? Something else had to be devised. The answer came from another British children’s literary classic: CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

  In his format document, Webber attempted to avoid giving the Doctor’s time-space machine any form at all, as he simply couldn’t devise a solution that the BBC could afford on a weekly TV budget. He didn’t want a ‘transparent plastic bubble’ or the clichéd spaceship from ‘low-grade space fiction [and] cartoon strip’. His solution was an absence of a ship, a ‘shape of nothingness’ into which the Doctor and his companions could pass to enter. In his notes in response to this, Newman criticised Webber’s concept as ‘not visual’, feeling that a ‘tangible symbol’ was needed for the ship.

  Webber had provided the answer in his document, but it took others to spot it. In his struggles to describe the ship while avoiding science-fictional clichés he suggested ‘something humdrum… such as a night-watchman’s shelter’ through which the Doctor and the gang could pass to ‘arrive inside a marvellous contrivance of quivering electronics’. Webber further suggested that the ship could adopt ‘some contemporary disguise’ wherever it went, and that ‘many visual possibilities can be worked out’. He concluded that the ship could be ‘a version of the dear old Magic Door’.