The William Hartnell Era: A Retrospective

The purpose of watching all of William Hartnell’s stories in order was firstly to experience quite a large number of stories which I’d never seen before, and secondly, as close as possible to replicate the experience that original viewers would have had when they watched them.

The second aim was only ever going to be partially achieved. The inhibiting factors were: -

I had already seen at least part of five stories in the past

I had read Target novelisations of some of the other stories

I wasn’t going to be able to watch them at the rate of one episode per week, watched at the same time on the same day of the week

I wasn’t going to wait several weeks between seasons.

I already had experience of watching other doctors, which the original audience wouldn’t have had the benefit of.

So, allowing for the inhibiting factors, what observations should I make about the experience?

Firstly, William Hartnell

William Hartnell was a terrific choice for the lead role. The fact that he makes your feelings about his character transform the way they do throughout the first season is testament to the levels and facets he brought to the character – and remember, he had no predecessor to either draw upon or react against if he so chose. In my opinion he excels in the small emotional scenes, when a character is leaving for example. The way he develops the Doctor’s relationships with his companions and some of the guest stars is terrific – the developing relationship with Barbara through the first season is one of the reasons which would have kept me coming back for more had I been around at the time the stories were first broadcast.

The fact that William Hartnell managed to become the undoubted star of his own show is another demonstration of the gifts he brought to the table. By the time that Ian and Barbara leave he will clearly miss them, but he doesn’t need them in the same way he did in the early stories. And although new companion Steven does come to be foregrounded in several stories, there is a subtle difference between the way that he is used, and the way that Ian was used. He acts heroically, but he is not the hero in the way that Ian certainly was in the earliest of the early days. 

I’ve already mentioned in some of the reviews of third season stories that I do find the way that Hartnell’s Doctor was sidelined for parts of the third series to be rather shabby treatment. “The Massacre” and “The Celestial Toymaker” are only two examples. It is true that Hartnell fluffs his lines in quite a lot of stories, but these ‘Billy fluffs’ as they are known I always find rather endearing, and actually they serve as another facet of character. I’ve read explanations of why the last two production teams of his time seemed to want to sideline him, and even to replace him, but what the plain truth is I don’t know. But I’ve found that I’ve developed a bit of an affection for his Doctor, in a way that I never thought I might. This was a time when we didn’t know who the Doctor was, or what the Doctor was, or why he left his people, or why he couldn’t go back, and there’s this quality of pathos on the occasions that he muses about going back.

Secondly, the Companions and the supporting cast

Starting with the Companions, considering that the title of the first episode was “An Unearthly Child”, Susan pretty quickly got bumped out of the series. I can understand why to some extent. It’s natural that the relationships that the writers/ script editor/ producers would want to explore was the Doctor’s relationships with the intelligent and gutsy Barbara, and the heroic and physically able Ian, both of whom just want him to take them back where they came from, something he is unable to do. Both William Russell and Jacqueline Hill were very well cast, and in Jacqueline Hill they had as fine an actress as any who were ever cast in the role of companion to the Doctor.

Things were never going to be the same once Ian and Barbara had departed, but Maureen O’Brien’s Vicki made a decent contribution to the show during her tenure, as did the underrated Peter Purves as Steven. Poor old Jackie Lane has come in for a fair bit of stick in her role of Dodo Chaplet, and I can understand why. This may just be the scripting, but Dodo only ever runs the gamut of emotions from A to B, and she is not the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer by any stretch of the imagination.

To return to speaking of fine actors, I was a little surprised at the number of ‘name’ actors who do actually appear in Hartnell stories. George Colouris in “The Keys of Marinus” was the first, but there were a surprising number of others. “The Massacre” alone featured Andre Morell and Leonard Sachs. Michael Gough was ill used, or under used in The Celestial Toymaker, but he was there. Amongst the maybe lesser known names there were some great performances in different stories too – I’m not going to mention all of them, but if we pick on just one story, John Ringham and Margo van der Bergh in “The Aztecs” come to mind. Then there’s Bernard Kay, Julian Glover and Jean Marsh in “The Crusade” I could go on.

Thirdly, the Historicals

When we talk about the true Doctor Who Historicals, as opposed to the sci fi stories which use a historical background, like The Time Meddler, then almost all of them belong to the Hartnell era. Only Troughton’s “The Highlanders” and Davison’s “Black Orchid” are true historicals in the rest of the whole of classic Doctor Who. I don’t know if this is sacrilege to say it, but if you look at the list of Hartnell historicals –

Marco Polo

The Aztecs

The Reign of Terror

The Romans

The Crusade

The Myth Makers

The Massacre

The Gunfighters

The Smugglers

- they contain some of my absolute favourite Hartnell stories. I love both “The Aztecs” and “The Massacre” – and like “Marco Polo” very much too. All scripted or co-scripted by John Lucarotti, it’s worth noting. Even looking at the ones I didn’t like quite so much, Dennis Spooner’s “Reign of Terror” and “The Romans” it’s not that they weren’t well written or well acted, it’s just that they didn’t happen to light my particular candle. I’m not entirely sure why they stopped doing them. If you look on the surface, there were 3 historicals in the first season (4 if you include An Unearthly Child) – 3 in the second season, and 3 in the third season. That seems fairly even, until you consider that it was 3/8 in season 1 – 3/9 in season 2, and 3/ 10 in the 3^rd season, a season in which a massive 12 episodes were taken up by the Daleks’ Master Plan. So I suppose that they were on decline throughout the Hartnell era in real terms.

I suppose – and I don’t know – but I suppose that they could be a little slow moving and wordy for the younger members of the audience, drawing as a lot of them do on the rich BBC heritage of period and classic serial dramas.

Fourthly, the Daleks

Like them or loathe them you can’t ignore them. With “The Daleks’ Masterplan” Terry Nation has penned his last black and white Dalek story. I respect the Daleks for making the show the success that it was, and for the fact that my 8 year old self found them very scary, in a good way. But as for my 50 year old self, meh. I just find them very two dimensional – in some stories literally so since some of them were obviously cut out blow ups. The thing about the Daleks is there’s a real lack of depth about them. They want to control the Univese, that much is clear. But why? Their leader is the Dalek Supreme at this point of their history. OK – but how did he get to be Dalek Supreme? I never voted for him. What’s in it for the other Daleks under his control? There doesn’t seem to be any promotion or demotion in the Dalek world. So what’s in it for them?

Well, anyway, I enjoyed The Dalek Invasion of Earth – my best Dalek story so far. I also liked bits of The Chase, although frankly a lot of it was very silly. As for the Dalek’s Master Plan, well it had a lot of magic moments throughout its marathon run time, but few of these involved the Daleks.

Fifthly, Sci Fi

It’s difficult to point to a Hartnell sci fi story which really holds water as a piece of hard science fiction, or even as a piece of good, tightly scripted television drama. Let’s leave the Dalek stories to one side as they have already had special consideration. That leaves : -

The Keys of Marinus

The Sensorites

Planet of Giants

The Rescue

The Web Planet

The Space Museum

The Time Meddler

Galaxy Four

The Ark

The War Machines

The Tenth Planet

In terms of concept, the first two episodes of the Ark come closest to an interesting piece of well plotted hard sci fi, and I also feel that the first episode of The Space Museum is worthy of a mention. Both of these stories become mired in traditional shoot-em-up space opera plotting, though, after their early promise. The Time Meddler succeeds because of the concept of another Time Traveller with a very different agenda to the Doctor’s, and the chemistry between Hartnell and Butterworth. The War Machines does well with its contemporary Earth setting, but for me it really doesn’t quite match The Dalek Invasion of Earth. The Web Planet deserves marks for trying, and I didn’t mind the Sensorites. The rescue was a bit of a bore, and Galaxy Four was just dire. But I have to say that I loved Planet of Giants, though maybe more for the effects than anything else. Which brings me to –

Sixthly, The Special Effects.

The conception of classic Doctor Who as being riddled with ‘rubber suit monsters and baco foil scenery’ is a cliché, and obviously you can’t judge the effects used in a story made in 1964, against one made 50 years later. But it is difficult to judge it by the standards of its time, simply because it was so long ago. For what it’s worth, my observations are –

Scenery/Interiors/Exteriors – There is a heavy reliance on painted backdrops, which I really don’t mind so much. They probably do have a tendency to look better on stills than in live action, which may be why the recons of Marco Polo look as good as they do. Generally the Historicals fair better for this then the other stories, although the jungle planets, and the jungle interiors in The Ark are very good indeed. Spaceship interiors are less convincing though – thinking of both the Sensorites and The Rescue the spaceship interiors just look like 1960s offices. The Dalek city interiors in “The Daleks” created a template with their endless shiny corridors, and their assymetrical doors which disappeared into the walls (highly impractical) which would recur, with some variations, throughout the show’s run.

A word about the TARDIS interior though. There are very few stories which showed as much of the TARDIS interior as “The Edge of Destruction” and it’s worth watching for that. The TARDIS interior, the control room especially is much bigger and more impressive than it would be from the Pertwee era onwards.

One story which stands out for me due to the quality of exteriors/interiors was Planet of Giants, which probably had a budget of tuppence ha’penny, but actually looked every bit as good as Hollywood movies such as the Incredible Shrinking Man – which actually had the money to do it properly.

Costume/Alien Design Again, the Historicals fair well, possibly because the designers didn’t have to rack their brains thinking about what people in this situation would actually look like, and historical costumes were fairly easy to source. The show owes so much to the Raymond Cusick realization of a very basic Terry Nation sketch of what the Daleks might look like. Next up were the Voord. Full marks for making us say – they look like men in diving suits, then showing us that they were actually in diving suits, but no marks for not showing us what they looked like under their helmets. The Sensorites’ masks are actually rather good, but their very basic costumes and those ridiculous feet are distracting. I can’t make up my mind whether having the robomen in those ramshackle headpieces in The Dalek Invasion of Earth is just shabby, or a stroke of genius. As for the Web Planet – well, where do you start? So much time , effort and energy – and possibly money as well – was spent on this show, but the technology just wasn’t available to do it justice in the 60s.

If you’re designing aliens for a show like Doctor Who, then you have basically two choices. You either use machines, or you use actors in suits. As for machines – well the show hit paydirt with their first attempt with the Daleks. There were others in the Hartnell era – but somehow the Mechanoids, the Chumblies and the War Machines just didn’t make the same impact. I quite like the Mechanoids, but it’s difficult to see how they could really have hurt the Daleks with their lack of weaponry.

As for men in suits, well, the trouble is that it’s very difficult to make a man in a suit not look like a man in a suit. So you have an impressive number of men in different suits in The Daleks’ Master Plan for instance, but they all look like men in different suits, apart from one who looks like an evil Christmas tree (not an original observation, but I can’t think of a different way of putting it). In the Ark, the Monoids represented a genuine attempt to get away from a basic humanoid shape, and it works in the first two episodes when they don’t speak. When they speak in episodes 3 and 4, though, the illusion is shattered. Maybe that’s what makes the cybermen in The Tenth Planet such a potentially good idea. Their shape is humanoid, because that’s where they started from. The realization on screen isn’t brilliant, but then there was only time and money to virtually thrown the first cybermen costumes together anyway, according to David ‘Cyberleader’ Banks’ book, published in the 80s. They would develop throughout the coming Troughton era.

Space Hardware/Models – While I was watching each episode I can’t say that I was sitting with a jotter in one hand and a pen in the other, noting down whenever I saw a nifty bit of model work, or space hardware, so this is just based on my recollections. I liked the start of Keys of Marinus, where the mini subs were approaching the Keeper’s island. I thought that the crashed spaceship in “The Rescue” was well up to the standard of what Gerry Anderson was producing at the time – and remember that he had the services of Derek Meddings to call on. There’s a couple of shots in “The Ark” – where we see the burning Earth, and where we see the Monoid statue being effected from the spaceship which don’t look bad now, and must have seemed highly impressive back in the day.

Seventhly, Interfering with Time and History

Well, can you or can’t you? If you take the Hartnell era as a whole, the picture is a confusing one. The first season Historicals all tow the party line, outlined clearly in “The Aztecs” that you cannot change History. The we get The Time Meddler. In The Time Meddler the Doctor has to stop one of his own kind from meddling with Earth history, so that Harold can eventually win the battle of Hastings. Why does the Doctor have to do this if it’s impossible for the Monk to actually change History? For that matter, why does the Doctor have to stop the War Machines? That’s part of Earth History – or it will be, as will the Dalek Invasion of 2064.

The doctrine that you can’t change History is untenable for the series in the long run. A more sensible attitude is that there are events in History that you absolutely shouldn’t change, and this is pretty much the attitude that the series will go on to take, leading to the post 2005 concept of fixed points in Time.

Finally, Legacy

William Hartnell’s era gradually established a template for the show, and while different teams and different writers would push the envelope, a lot of the show’s quintessential values are already apparent before the end of the Hartnell Era. The Doctor’s eccentricity, his cunning, his basic decency and his willingness to stand against injustice, and help those who need help are all seen at different times. It’s clear right from the start that the Doctor will never travel without a companion. (Alright, he does in The Deadly Assassin, but that’s a special case) This hints at the essential loneliness which is a part of every Doctor’s character – even Jon Pertwee’s and Tom Baker’s.