Table of Contents

Title Page

CONTENTS

OVERVIEW

SYNOPSIS

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE – ON THE EDGE

PART TWO – BEYOND THE BRINK

PART THREE – INSIDE THE SPACESHIP

CONCLUSIONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIOGRAPHY

The Black Archive #67

THE EDGE OF DESTRUCTION

By Simon Guerrier

Published October 2023 by Obverse Books

Cover Design © Cody Schell

Icon © Blair Bidmead

Text © Simon Guerrier, 2023

Editors: Stuart Douglas, Philip Purser-Hallard

Simon Guerrier has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding, cover or e-book other than which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

BBC copyright content reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting corporation. All rights reserved.

For Toby Hadoke

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CONTENTS

Overview

Synopsis

Introduction

Part One: On the Edge

Part Two: Beyond the Brink

Part Three: Inside the Spaceship

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Biography

OVERVIEW

Serial Title: The Edge of Destruction

Writer: David Whitaker

Directors: Richard Martin, Frank Cox

Original UK Transmission Dates: 8–15 February 1964

Running Time: ‘The Edge of Destruction’: 25m 04s

‘The Brink of Disaster’: 22m 11s

UK Viewing Figures: ‘The Edge of Destruction’: 10.4 million

‘The Brink of Disaster’: 9.9 million

Regular Cast: William Hartnell (Dr Who), William Russell (Ian Chesterton), Jacqueline Hill (Barbara Wright), Carole Ann Ford (Susan Foreman).

Antagonists: The TARDIS, an unnamed protostar

Responses:

‘This is a quick hit, just 45 minutes, and still just as intense as it was 48 years ago [with] the first hints that the TARDIS is a living, telepathic entity rather than just a machine.’

[Charlie Jane Anders, ‘Old-School Doctor Who Episodes That Everyone Should Watch’, Gizmodo.com, 2012]

‘Nothing happens. Threads of mystery are half-heartedly picked up, toyed with, and then cast aside in favour of the next idea to pop into whichever character’s head […] Thank the stars it was only two episodes.’

[Jessica Holmes, ‘The Edge of Disappointment’, GalacticJourney.org, 2019]

SYNOPSIS

‘The Edge of Destruction’

After an explosion on board the TARDIS, Barbara, Ian and Susan become confused and briefly lose their memories, while the Doctor is badly injured. The doors of the Ship open, potentially allowing an invisible presence into the TARDIS.

The travellers continue to behave oddly. As if possessed, Susan stabs at furniture with a pair of scissors, while Barbara screams and throws her watch across the room. The TARDIS too behaves erratically and the Doctor and Susan become paranoid, using telepathic communication with one another and accusing their companions of plotting against them.

As night falls, an uneasy peace breaks out. As the travellers sleep, someone grabs the Doctor by the throat.

‘The Brink of Disaster’

The attacker is Ian, who collapses when challenged. The Doctor is by now convinced that Barbara and Ian are plotting to take control of the TARDIS and threatens to throw them off the Ship.

Fortunately, the Fault Locator, an in-built TARDIS warning system, begins to blare out, and they realise that the TARDIS has been affecting their minds in an attempt to warn them of imminent calamity. The Ship is on course to be destroyed in the formation of a new star system.

The Doctor identifies the problem: the spring inside the ‘fast-return switch’ on the TARDIS control console has broken; it is as though the switch is held down constantly. He corrects the fault and order is restored.

Later, the travellers, now on much better terms, don new clothes from the TARDIS wardrobe and venture out on to a snowy plateau, where Susan discovers the footprint of a giant.

INTRODUCTION

‘Really, there’s no more time for these absurd theories.’

[The Doctor, ‘The Edge of Destruction’]

Hello. Before we get into my 10 absurd theories about this particular Doctor Who story, I’ve a theory about you, the reader of this book. I think you:

- Have seen 2013 drama An Adventure in Space and Time.

- Can identify moments in it that aren’t quite what really happened.

- Understand why such dramatic licence was necessary[1].

Perhaps my deductions are completely wrong – or just pretentious and annoying. But I’ve come to this theory about you by applying some simple logic. You’re reading the 67th title in the Black Archive range, in this case devoted to an odd little two-part Doctor Who story from 1964. That demonstrates interest in the earliest days of the programme, so it is logical to assume that you’ve seen the acclaimed BBC drama about the same subject.

Then there’s my second deduction. Given the specialist focus of this book, it’s unlikely to be the first thing you’ve read about the history of Doctor Who. A range of books, magazines and documentaries explore the history of the series in detail, and you don’t have to search hard to find some aspect of the historical record that didn’t feature in An Adventure in Space and Time. In fact, the production team who made the drama discussed such discrepancies openly[2].

If you’re aware of that, and the history of Doctor Who more generally, then you have surely also gained some sense of the practicalities of television, the limits on time and resources, the need for compromise etc. I think that ongoing conflict between ambition and practicality is why the making of Doctor Who is so fascinating – and the fact you’re still reading this suggests that you do too.

Now, you might roll your eyes at this fourth-wall stuff, a book – an inanimate object! – trying to worm its way into your head. But I need this theory, this sense of you, to know at what level to pitch the book that follows.

This isn’t an unusual process for anyone writing a book, or developing a TV show. In the spring and summer of 1963, Sydney Newman, co-creator of Doctor Who, was keen that his colleagues read an academic study into ways children respond to and comprehend science fiction drama[3]. ‘I read [it] with great interest,’ producer Verity Lambert later recalled, ‘because I had no understanding of children, not having any of my own.’[4] The study guided her sense of the tone and content of Doctor Who to ensure it made for compulsive viewing.

Her story editor, David Whitaker, already had experience in this kind of assessment. The BBC’s Written Archive Centre (WAC) in Caversham holds a copy of his 11-page ‘Paper on Sunday Night Plays’, full of deductions about how to make the BBC’s drama output more appealing to the audience, and written a year before he joined Doctor Who[5]. My guess is that this kind of exercise, this imaginative leap in understanding the minds of those on the far side of the screen, informed the Doctor Who story that is the subject of this book – as I’ll detail in Part Two.

But first let’s deal with why I have to guess at all.

One reason there’s such an industry devoted to the history of Doctor Who is that there’s so much material to dig into. It’s been a popular programme for a very long time, and there are an awful lot of episodes: 253 of them broadcast between 1963 and 1969, an average of more than 42 per year. While not all of these survive, we also have clips, scripts, soundtracks, photographs and a wealth of production paperwork. To give an example of the richness available, the recent Blu-ray release of Season 2, the 1964-65 season of Doctor Who, includes 4,203 pages of such material as PDFs – and a few more pages can be glimpsed on screen in some of the accompanying documentaries. Then there are all the interviews with cast and crew.

But this great volume of primary evidence doesn’t provide a complete picture, and it’s worth detailing why. Most original paperwork relating to Doctor Who is held at WAC. For just the first year that the series was in production (1963-64), WAC holds two bulging files of ‘general’ paperwork, a big folder of correspondence from and to members of the public, and nine additional files.

Each of these nine files generally relates to an individual episode of Doctor Who, one per serial. File T5/638 covers the very first episode, ‘An Unearthly Child’ (An Unearthly Child (1963) episode 1) (both the original pilot and remounted versions), and file T5/639 covers the fifth of seven episodes of The Daleks (1963-64) (‘The Expedition’ (1964)). They’re then generally for the final episode of each serial: T5/640 for the final episode of Marco Polo (1964) (‘Assassin at Peking’); T5/641 for the final episode of The Keys of Marinus (1964) (also called ‘The Keys of Marinus’); T5/642 for the final episode of The Aztecs (1964) (‘The Day of Darkness’); T5/643 for the final episode of The Sensorites (1964) (‘A Desperate Venture’), and T5/644, covering the final half of The Reign of Terror (1964) (‘The Tyrant of France’, ‘A Bargain of Necessity’ and ‘Prisoners of Conciergerie’) – but with no more pages than those files for single episodes. T5/645 covers the final episode of Planet of Giants (1964) (‘Crisis’) and T5/646 covers the final episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) (‘Flashpoint’), serials produced as part of the first production block but broadcast as part of Season 2.

These folders tend to contain – but it’s not always the case – an itemised budget including what the cast were each paid, a props list, a brief for make-up and wardrobe, the billing for listings magazine Radio Times and copies of memos sent by the director’s assistant. Beyond that, the information is not very consistent. The fact that most of these files are for the final episode of a serial means that the information contained is not always very informative. For example, a form for the make-up and wardrobe requirements for each of the cast will often say ‘See previous episodes’ (or similar), but no paperwork has been kept from those. The result is that, though there may be plenty of paperwork, the history is riddled with holes.

There’s a much more sizeable gap in the record relating to the two-part story that is the subject of this book. Note that there’s no individual file at all for either of the two episodes. There is also very little about the serial in the general or correspondence files. A few more details can be gleaned from other WAC files, such as those held on writer David Whitaker, but it doesn’t amount to very much. In fact, some of these papers subtract from the total available evidence, as they contradict the account given in several interviews with cast and crew about why the story was commissioned in the first place.

This sizeable gap in the history is all the more tantalising because so much weighed upon this small story. What we do know is that it was commissioned very late, when Doctor Who was in real trouble and facing cancellation before the first episode had even been broadcast. With serious overspending on previous episodes, it had to be a very cheap production; with serious doubts about the viability of Doctor Who at all, it had to work as a conclusion to the series.

I think that fact opens a door into these two episodes and that we can apply a bit of logic to tease out yet more detail. In what follows, I’ll argue that Serial C aimed to fulfil the original, bold ambitions of Doctor Who, to complete the stories of its principal characters, and to finish Doctor Who satisfactorily for good.

What’s more, I think David Whitaker cannily seeded these episodes with ways to ensure that, even if Doctor Who was cancelled, it could still return. And I think these two episodes show how – very quickly and caught on the hop – Whitaker and producer Verity Lambert adapted what Doctor Who even was, and in doing so turned a series facing cancellation into a lasting success.

That’s a lot to take in, so we’ll go through this in stages.

- In Part One, I’ll outline the sources that exist for Serial C: the stuff we know for sure.

- In Part Two, I’ll use this bedrock of fact as the basis for five absurd theories, deducing what the story aimed to do.

- And in Part Three, I’ll address what the Radio Times preview of the story called its ‘unseen, but none the less powerful’ fifth character–, with five more absurd theories about the TARDIS herself. Apart from the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara, what actually is inside the spaceship? In fact, I think I can explain the key to the TARDIS…

A Note on Titles

The title of this book uses The Edge of Destruction as the overall name for the story comprising two episodes. This is a widely used convention dating back to the Tenth Anniversary Special published by Radio Times in 1973[6], and featured on both the novelisation and DVD release of the story. But ‘The Edge of Destruction’ is also the name of the first episode, which could lead to confusion in what’s to follow. Therefore, when I speak of ‘The Edge of Destruction’ I refer to the first episode, and I’ll follow the convention used by the production team at the time and use ‘Serial C’ for the story as a whole.

[1] First broadcast on 21 November 2013 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, this drama recounted the creation and early days of the series. David Whitaker, writer of the serial that’s the subject of this book and a key figure in those early days, doesn’t feature beyond the briefest name-check. Writer Mark Gatiss had to condense lots of real history into 83 minutes of drama, and one way he did this was amalgamating Whitaker’s role with that of associate producer Mervyn Pinfield.

[2] ‘This is a drama not a documentary,’ writer Mark Gatiss told the BBC website in pre-publicity, ‘and though it’s extremely painful to have to leave out some people who played a huge part, it makes dramatic sense.’ He then listed examples, including that Pinfield’s character in the drama ‘sort of absorbs several others including Donald Wilson and the brilliant David Whitaker – the first script editor – whose contribution was immeasurable.’ (‘Mark Gatiss on An Adventure in Space and Time (Updated)’, 2013.),

[3] Lloyd, W Arnold, et al, Under Observation, 1963.

[4] Quoted in Bentham, J Jeremy, Doctor Who: The Early Years, p91.

[5] Whitaker, David, ‘Paper on Sunday Night Plays’, 3 July 1962, internal BBC document, a copy included in WAC T16/62/3 (TV Policy Drama File 3 1959-1964).

[6] Radio Times, Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special, p9.

PART ONE – ON THE EDGE

What We Know about Serial C

‘Well, you read a story into all these things and were determined to hold on to it.’

[The Doctor, ‘The Brink of Disaster’]

Cast, Crew and Cumulative Reiteration

Serial C is an peculiar adventure, even for Doctor Who. The series can go anywhere in time and space – that is the whole point, after all – but Serial C is set almost entirely on board the TARDIS, except for the very brief final shot that leads into the next story. It’s the equivalent of a wet playtime at school, the lead characters behaving much like bored, boxed-in pupils. We then learn that this strange behaviour, and everything weird in the story, is all down to a tiny broken spring inside a switch…

What on earth were the production team thinking?

The June 1976 issue of Doctor Who Appreciation Society fanzine TARDIS provided an explanation from no less authoritative a source than the original producer of Doctor Who. Asked if the limited setting aimed ‘to save money’, Verity Lambert responded that, ‘we felt it was necessary to show more of the inside of the TARDIS and to explain some of the workings that viewers might not normally see.’[1] The implication is that it wasn’t about saving money – though Lambert didn’t say so explicitly.

More detail came later the same year from the designer of the story, Raymond Cusick, who was also interviewed for TARDIS. When this was published in 1977, the fanzine reported merely that Serial C ‘involved Mr Cusick extending the TARDIS set to include rest-rooms and more of the control room.’[2] But Jan Vincent-Rudzki and Stephen Payne, who conducted the interview, told a meeting of the DWAS executive around November 1976 that Cusick also claimed that the story came about because the sets for the story Marco Polo – originally intended to be the third Doctor Who story – had not been ready in time (presumably because of late scripts). Another member of DWAS at the meeting, Jeremy Bentham, duly recorded in his notebook that, ‘Polo sets delayed [and] Whitaker story filled gap’; over Christmas Bentham added this to the ‘additional notes’ of the ‘story information’ pages produced for fans outlining the plots of old episodes[3].

Early versions of Bentham’s story information gave the title of Serial C as The Edge of Destruction, following the precedent of the Tenth Anniversary Special published by Radio Times that listed many early serials by the name of their first episode; the same titles were then used by the 1976 edition of the book The Making of Doctor Who[4]. But Bentham clearly thought that wasn’t right (or could lead to confusion), and at least one version of the story information for Serial C used the name of the second episode, ‘The Brink of Disaster’, as the overall title. Then, in late 1978 or early 1979, he had access to early production paperwork held by the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, which listed a number of titles including ‘Beyond the Sun’.

We now know that this was a working title for the preceding story, The Daleks. Not knowing any better at the time, Bentham thought it made sense as the title of Serial C, ‘because it sort-of [sic] located where the TARDIS ended up’ at the end of the story [5]. He used ‘Beyond the Sun’ as the title of Serial C on his revised story information pages, again for the synopsis of the story published in Doctor Who Weekly issue 5 in November 1979 and for the issue of the fanzine An Adventure in Space and Time devoted to the serial, published in 1980.

The latter gathered together the then-known facts to explain why Serial C was so odd, so short, and all set inside the TARDIS: ‘The reason for the sudden commissioning of this “filler” was that the sets for the following serial, Marco Polo, were not ready by the time they were required to start filming,’ we’re told. ‘As the only set available was that of the TARDIS, it was decided to utilise this, together with the four members of the regular cast.’ The fanzine also added a new piece of information: ‘“Beyond the Sun” was written by the story editor, David Whitaker, in just one day.’[6] Bentham’s surviving notes from the time suggest he was given this new information in September 1979 by Gary Hopkins, who corresponded with Whitaker. But Hopkins kindly shared his original correspondence with me: a single letter from Whitaker, dated 28 October 1978, that makes no reference to Serial C. In fact, Whitaker dodges questions about his own work on Doctor Who to instead praise other members of the production team.

The detail about the speed at which the story was written may have come from another member of the production team – though I’ve not tracked down a source. The two episodes were screened in August 1980 at the Inter-face 1 convention with members of the cast and crew in attendance, and it’s possible one of them said, or was understood to have said, that the story was written quickly. Bentham himself wonders if he and Hopkins deduced the ‘fact’ that Whitaker wrote the episodes extremely quickly because ‘so many ideas did not get as fleshed out and explained as you would expect from a writer of his calibre.’[7] In 1985, Doctor Who Magazine published a feature seeming to confirm this; it quoted Whitaker in a letter to fan Guy Deveson saying he had ‘spent about two days and most of two nights’ writing the serial[8]. Yet I’m increasingly sceptical about the veracity of this Deveson material. No copy of the letter is known to survive; some of what ‘Whitaker’ says in it seems to be things fans generally believed at the time but have since been supplanted with better evidence; and Deveson’s name doesn’t otherwise appear in fanzines or other fan circles (as Hopkins’ does), or in the electoral register. Richard Marson, who compiled the feature for Doctor Who Magazine (DWM) nearly 40 years ago, does not remember much from the time, but agrees that it is possible that the Deveson letter he worked from wasn’t genuine[9].

Whatever the case, Bentham revised his own earlier statement in a slightly different way for his 1986 book The Early Years, saying Whitaker was, ‘believed to have put together the first of his two fifty-page scripts [for Serial C] in one afternoon.’[10] Bentham can’t recall now what prompted this amendment, but the word ‘believed’ could suggest his own doubts about this ‘fact’. I think this is an example of what biographer Hermione Lee calls ‘cumulative reiteration’: a theory devised to fit some facts is then repeated so often that it becomes seen as a fact itself. Lee says it ‘happens all the time’ in biography[11], and this process can even affect what a witness to events believes to be true. For example, a 1982 edition of the fanzine TARDIS features an interview with Frank Cox, director of ‘The Brink of Disaster’. Interviewer Ian K McLachlan asks whether the serial ‘being written at the last minute’ caused Cox any problems; he replies that he could not recall ‘production difficulties such as you suggest’[12] – yet the idea was surely planted in his mind. In a later interview published in the same fanzine, Cox volunteered as fact, unprompted, that Serial C had been ‘written virtually overnight’[13].

We can see something similar in the documentary about the making of Serial C included on the 2006 DVD release. This begins with Richard Martin, director of the first episode, explaining that the story was a ‘time maker’ commissioned because of ‘a delay both, I believe in the script department [in providing information] for the Marco Polo sets, and also for the costumes and everything else’ meant that ‘there were suddenly two weeks in the schedule with a nasty gap.’ That this explanation begins the documentary and is given by one of its directors, suggests that it is authoritative – a fact. But Martin’s ‘I believe’ is important: this isn’t information he provides as a first-hand witness, but something he has learned since.

The documentary then provides an alternative explanation for the commissioning of the story. ‘David was asked to do a filler,’ says Waris Hussein, director of Marco Polo, because ‘the Daleks went over budget and Marco Polo was quite an expensive story coming up.’[14] He repeats the claim that Marco Polo ran late, but implies that Serial C was commissioned to save money. Yet that contradicts what producer Verity Lambert seemed to tell TARDIS, so we are back to square one.

In fact, we can even get contradictory answers from the same individual. Interviewed in 1984, actress Carole Ann Ford couldn’t explain the plot of the story. ‘None of us knew what it was all about,’ she said. ‘We went mad […] It was just so weird, and whenever we said, “But why are we behaving like this?” it was always a question of, “Never mind, read the words and get on with it.”’

The result had not been very fulfilling. Indeed, her favourite Doctor Who story was Planet of Giants because, ‘the giant sets were superb – you almost didn’t need to act.’[15] But when Ford was interviewed for the 2022 documentary ‘Looking for David’, she gave a very different response when Serial C was mentioned. ‘Oh, my favourite piece!’ she enthused, ‘because it was so intense [and] gave us a chance to act – well certainly me, anyway. I was grateful. It was marvellous.’[16]

I don’t think she simply changed her mind about the story. Rather, the context in which she was interviewed on these two occasions was different. In the first, she gave an opinion of the serial’s merits based on her ability to explain the plot and the quality of its sets. In the second, we asked her to recall the friends she worked with at the time, many of them now dead. She answers from her heart not her head, and we get a different perspective.

In pointing this out, I don’t mean to criticise the value of interviews with cast and crew – I conduct many such interviews, and they can be extremely insightful. We simply need to acknowledge their subjective nature and the limits of memory. Where possible, we should cross-check with other evidence. Written sources are less liable to change over time, so what do they tell us that might explain Serial C?

In fact, there seem to be a number of reasons why this strange little story came to be, born out of a broader context. In what follows I include things that might not at first seem relevant, but are part of the foundation of fact on which I’ll build theories in Part Two.

The Problem of the Spaceship: What We Know from WAC

On 29 March 1963, BBC staff writer Cecil Webber wrote up two pages of notes on an as-yet unnamed new science fiction serial, based on discussions with colleagues including Donald Wilson, the drama department’s new Head of Serials[17]. The first paragraph envisaged a ‘loyalty programme’ running for at least 52 weeks. Even before the idea became Doctor Who, it was meant to run a long time.

By 9 May, this series had a title[18]; a week later various drafts were produced on the background and approach to what was now called Doctor Who[19]. By the draft dated 16 May, a brief outline of the initial story had been agreed. ‘The Giants’ would dramatise proportion and size: at the end of the first episode, the four main characters were to find themselves shrunk down to the size of pinheads[20]. This document was prepared by Wilson, Webber and their boss, the BBC’s new Head of Drama, Sydney Newman. Wilson and Newman are generally credited today as the creators of Doctor Who. Indeed, Newman later claimed that the shrinking story had been his idea entirely, as he wanted ‘the children, the audience, to understand the importance [and] relativities of size.’[21]

On 31 May, Wilson met with Ian Atkins, Controller of Programme Services for Television, to argue that the technical challenges of this ambitious story could only be realised using the brand new facilities at BBC Television Centre[22]. But other productions took priority and Doctor Who had been assigned to the older, less well-equipped Studio D in Lime Grove. Wilson continued to argue against this over the coming weeks. Meanwhile, on 4 June, he sent Newman the synopsis Webber had written for the four episodes of ‘The Giants’, adding that draft scripts of its first two episodes would be ready by the end of the following week – i.e. Friday 14 June[23].

Newman was unhappy with the synopsis: he said it lacked incident, real emotion and intelligence. He also thought giant spiders, and the police box shrinking before a policeman’s eyes, would be too impractical to realise[24].

There were further problems on 13 June. Richard Levin, the BBC’s head of design, complained to Joanna Spicer, the BBC’s Assistant Controller (Planning), that his staff could not meet the demands of the new programme on the given schedule when no scripts had yet been received[25].

On the same day, Donald Baverstock, the chief of programmes for BBC1, refused permission to transfer specialist inlay equipment used in special effects from TV Centre to Riverside Studios – a compromise that might have made it possible to realise ‘The Giants’[26].

A meeting held on 17 June agreed a change of plan: the giants story would be postponed, and Doctor Who would now begin with two four-part stories specifically written for recording in Lime Grove[27]. Serial 1 and Serial 2, as they were called, would be written not by Webber but by another staff writer, Anthony Coburn – though the first episode of Doctor Who would still owe something to Webber[28]. The hope was that the Giants story would be Serial 3 if, by the time of recording, Doctor Who could be transferred to the better facilities at Riverside.

At a meeting the same day, design organiser James Bould expressed concern that the design and execution of the spaceship to feature in the series would need considerably more time than was available, given recording of the first episode was due to take place on 2 August[29]. On 25 June, Lambert met with Bould and his head of department, Richard Levin, with the scripts for the first two episodes and a detailed breakdown of the sets required in episodes three and four[30]. By 1 July, the decision had been made to postpone recording: the first (pilot) episode of Doctor Who would now record on 27 September[31]. A day after this decision was taken, Peter Brachacki was assigned as designer[32].

Things seemed to be back on track. On 12 July, story editor David Whitaker provided Wilson with a progress report: he had commissioned Coburn for both a four-part serial ‘Dr Who and the Tribe of Gum’ and a now six-part second serial with the working title ‘Dr Who and the Robots’. With still no prospect of getting into Riverside to produce the giants story, the third serial on the schedule would be a seven-part serial by John Lucarotti: ‘Dr Who & a Journey to Cathay’. Whitaker had also requested storylines from a number of other writers, including an old colleague from his days in light entertainment, Terry Nation, and also John Bowen and Jeremy Bullmore[33]. This pair had, under the name ‘Justin Blake’, created the adventure serial Garry Halliday (1959-62), broadcast in the same Saturday teatime slot that Doctor Who would soon occupy; Whitaker had himself written two serials for Garry Halliday, totalling 13 half-hour episodes.

But on 16 July, producer Verity Lambert reported more problems. She’d been waiting to meet designer Brachacki since his appointment on 2 July. On 10 July, he was finally able to spare her, director Waris Hussein and associate producer Mervyn Pinfield just half an hour, where he told them he would not be available to start work on their programme for another fortnight[34]; in fact, though he completed a number of drawings in August, he was too busy to meet with Lambert again to discuss design in detail until 21 August[35]. Wilson raised this lack of resource with head of design Richard Levin on 17 July, pointing out that he had met with Bould in early June to discuss provision for Doctor Who and since then had not been informed of any concerns[36]. On 29 July, it was confirmed that there was no provision in the agreed budgets for visual effects staff to work on Doctor Who[37] – surely an extraordinary thing for a science fiction series.

On 8 August, David Whitaker confirmed that Terry Nation’s story – at this point intended to be the fourth serial – had been extended to seven episodes[38]. The same day, Whitaker warned that the technical limitations of Studio D in Lime Grove, to which Doctor Who now seemed to have been permanently assigned, would mean abandoning the ‘minuscule’ story in which characters were reduced in size[39]; the fact he didn’t refer to this as ‘The Giants’ may indicate that by this point he and Lambert had decided not to pursue Webber’s version of the story but were still keen on the basic idea.

The following day, Brachacki produced the first of six sheets of design drawings for the as-yet unnamed spaceship to feature in the series, in this case detailing the roundel-inset walls[40]. On 10 August, Coburn devised the acronym ‘TARDIS’ while revising his script for the first episode[41]. Brachacki produced his design for the central control console two days later, specifying that it should be mounted on a circular track so the whole thing could revolve, with the main tabletop fitted with handles and hidden microphones.

This was also the day on which Wilson appealed to Newman about the technical requirements of the minuscule episode[42]; Newman replied the following day, assuring Wilson that he would do his best to have the required inlay and outlay resources available to produce the minuscule story[43]. The story remained fourth on the schedule when, on 22 August, Lambert sought expert help in realising its extensive effects[44]. Brachacki produced the last of his six sheets of designs for the TARDIS control room on 29 August.

On 1 September, the first mention of Doctor Who was made public in the News of the World, which said the new series would not ‘be one of those economy-size serials made from left-overs in the studio,’ and quoted actress Carole Ann Ford: ‘I’ve got a 52-week contract – this is going to make history on British television.’[45] At a press conference in Blackpool on 12 September, the BBC’s controller of programmes on television, Stuart Hood, formally announced the 52-week run of Doctor Who as part of the BBC’s autumn schedule, the long duration noted in much of the press coverage that followed[46]. All of which suggested BBC confidence in the longevity of the new series.

An experimental recording session on 13 September was followed on 19 September by pre-filming at the BBC’s Television Film Studios at Ealing of some material for the first and fourth episodes of Doctor Who, including the police box exterior of the TARDIS seen on a barren desert landscape.

Yet, despite the first four-episode story being specially written for the limitations of Studio D, and despite all Lambert’s efforts to agree matters in advance with the design department, there now came a request to increase the staffing allocation, measured in ‘man hours’. The first serial of four episodes had been allocated a total of 350 man hours; now the demand was for 150 man hours per episode, or 600 in all – an increase of more than 71%, just as production began[47].

At the same time, there were issues with the serials themselves.

On 16 September, story editor David Whitaker listed the sequence of stories: Serial A, as he called it, would be Coburn’s four-part ‘Tribe of Gum’, Serial B was Coburn again with his six-part ‘Robots’ story, Serial C was ‘Journey to Cathay’ (aka Marco Polo). Serial D was assigned to Robert Gould, now responsible for (re)writing the minuscule story. Serial E was the story by Terry Nation, and Serial F – listed in the memo as a second E – was by writer Malcolm Hulke. In total, that comprised 34 episodes[48].

But a week later, on 23 September, Coburn’s ‘Robots’ story was listed as following Gould’s minuscule adventure[49]. Terry Nation had delivered scripts which so thrilled Lambert and Whitaker that the story was brought forward to become Serial B. In contrast, on 27 September, Whitaker reported that he’d received just the first four of six scripts for the ‘Robots’ serial[50]. Coburn’s son Stef later met with Lambert and got a ‘grudging admission that there was an argument’[51].

Meanwhile, on 25 September, two increases were requested in Brachacki’s budget for the pilot episode recorded two days later[52]. Productions often incurred extra, last-minute costs – the production files on later Doctor Who serials include similar requests. But there were serious problems with Brachacki’s set: when the interior doors would not close, recording had to be restarted. Wilson later claimed that the design work was defective, and one of the reasons the entire first episode had to be remounted on 18 October[53].

Whatever these rumblings, on 30 September, Whitaker confirmed a list of all 52 episodes of Doctor Who:

Serial A – ‘The Tribe of Gum’ by Anthony Coburn, four episodes

Serial B – ‘The Mutants’ aka The Daleks by Terry Nation, seven eps

Serial C – Marco Polo aka ‘Journey to Cathay’ by John Lucarotti, seven episodes

Serial D – minuscule story by Robert Gould, four episodes

Serial E – ‘The Robots’ aka ‘The Masters of Luxor’ by Coburn, six episodes

Serial F – ‘The Hidden Planet’ by Malcolm Hulke, six episodes

Serial G – unknown, but probably assigned to Whitaker himself, seven episodes

Serial H – ‘The Red Fort’ by Nation, seven episodes

Serial I – probably Lucarotti, four episodes[54].

That schedule remained in place over the next week. By 8 October director Richard Martin had been assigned to the minuscule story[55]. But that same day, Lambert wrote a memo to Wilson listing the costs incurred if production were to go no further than 8 November, i.e. if Doctor Who concluded after just four episodes[56]. It’s the first suggestion in the paperwork that the programme was at serious risk of cancellation before it had even gone on air.

On 10 October, Wilson wrote a four-page memo to Baverstock, copied to various other senior figures, laying out the failures of the design department to deliver on their commitments. This included the fact that design and planning departments had repeatedly sent memos about what could and could not be achieved on Doctor Who without copying in anyone from the drama department (such as himself, producer Verity Lambert or their boss Sydney Newman). Among these memos had been the assistant head of design’s estimate that additional staff required to produce model and effects work for Doctor Who would cost £5,135 per year, plus more for equipment. As Wilson said, the inability to provide what had been asked for since early June only became apparent to his team in the days running up to recording of the pilot episode. He had then been told that provision for future episodes would require significant additional costs each week, over and above the agreed budget for the programme. This, of course, put the whole viability of Doctor Who in doubt.

According to Wilson, Joanna Spicer agreed an £800 extension to the budget to enable the first four episodes to go into production, and the idea seems to have been to see how this went before proceeding any further. But, said Wilson, if a decision hadn’t been made to continue with the series before 1 November (the day the third episode was to be recorded), there would not be time to design and build the sets for the second serial so that production could follow straight on from the end of the first. Fees totalling £550 per week would need to be paid to the four regular actors during any such gap, and there would be other practical concerns, all of which again risked making the series unviable. Wilson argued that Baverstock should commit at minimum to 11 episodes (the four-part serial by Coburn and the seven-part Dalek serial by Nation), and ideally to at least 18 (i.e. including the seven episodes of Marco Polo as Serial C)[57].

While the design department responded to these serious complaints[58], on 16 October Baverstock agreed to accept an initial 13 episodes of Doctor Who, so long as John Mair in planning could confirm by the end of that week what additional budget would be needed for special effects above the £2,300 allocated to each episode[59]. However much it might have suited Wilson to commit to 11 or 18 episodes, 13 was more convenient for scheduling purposes, as a quarter of the year; indeed Garry Halliday had often been broadcast in blocks of 13, each comprising one serial of six episodes and one of seven.

On 17 October, the design costs for the pilot episode of Doctor Who were confirmed: £603 for the day of pre-filming, and a huge £4,626 for the studio recording, which included £2,599 spent on labour and £1,210 on materials. This breakdown was copied to Barry Newbery, who would replace Peter Brachacki as designer on the remounted episode[60]. The following day, Friday 18 October, Baverstock wrote to Newman about this enormous overspend: having agreed to increase the budget for each episode from £2,300 to £2,500, he now found that each of the four episodes was projected to cost more than £4,000! He told Newman firmly not to proceed with more than four episodes, and to draw up plans for an entirely new children’s serial to replace Doctor Who[61]. Baverstock then left for three weeks in the USA[62].

That all seemed pretty final, yet work continued on Doctor Who. That same day, director Christopher Barry wrote to story editor David Whitaker with his notes on the scripts for the first two episodes of The Daleks[63]. Barry addressed this to Whitaker’s home address rather than his office at the BBC, suggesting Whitaker spent the weekend of 19 and 20 October revising the scripts at home. He was up against the clock because design drawings based on information contained in the script of the first episode were due for delivery to the scenic servicing department by 24 October[64]. There is no record of complaints, suggesting that Whitaker delivered on time.

Memos continued to circulate about costs, what had been agreed by whom and when, and what could be done. At a meeting on 22 October, Joanna Spicer confirmed that Baverstock would still accept 13 episodes of Doctor Who if he could afford them[65]. On 25 October, Spicer confirmed an allocation of £2,500 for each of the first 13 episodes, which included £200 per episode for an external scenic effects firm, taking pressure off the BBC’s own design and visual effects departments. Lambert was also to allocate £75 from the budget of each episode to pay off the costs of the TARDIS set. Over 13 episodes, that would amount to £975, which was still far short of the £4,000 needed. The rest would now be covered by a special allocation. Except for the work already done on the TARDIS, the episodes would be fixed at 500 man hours each.

The same day, director Richard Martin wrote to Whitaker with notes on The Daleks, presumably having read the newly revised scripts. But his concerns were not related to Nation’s plot or dialogue; his concern was all about the logistics of the TARDIS, including why it looked like a police box. There is no record of a response and Martin could not remember this intervention, but it may be that these ideas resulted in a last-minute rewrite of the episode that was recorded in studio just three days later:

IAN

Incredible. A police box in the midst of… Oh, it just doesn’t make sense!

SUSAN

It should have changed. Wonder why it hasn’t happened this time… It’s been an ionic column and a sedan chair.

BARBARA

Disguising itself wherever it goes.[66]

On 24 October, Lambert calculated the costs of the pilot episode and four episodes of the first four-part serial. Not including the £4,656 spent on ‘scenery’ (i.e. the TARDIS), the actual cost of the pilot was £2,165 3/ 3d – that is, under the £2,300 budgeted. The actual cost of the remounted first episode was £1,776 2/ 0d, which was considerably less than the revised £2,500 budget. Estimated costs of the remaining three episodes of the serial were also below budget, meaning that a saving of £1,118 14/s 9d across these five episodes could be used to pay off the TARDIS debt, leaving £3,537 5/ 3d to be found from the allocation for the remaining nine episodes[67].

There were still grumbles. On 30 October, JF Mudie, head of scenic servicing, sent Spicer another memo attaching correspondence from June and July casting light on the problems with Doctor Who, and added that design drawings for the fifth episode (i.e. the first episode of The Daleks), due on 24 October, had still not been received. Mudie concluded that the series should be halted altogether, before the third episode had been recorded [68]. But the same day, Spicer confirmed that Lambert had met the requirements set out five days before, so production would proceed with 13 episodes of Doctor Who: four for the opening serial known today as An Unearthly Child, seven for The Daleks and, for the first time confirmed in writing, a new, two-episode Serial C[69]. The following day, Lambert issued an amendment to the promotional material for Doctor Who originally drafted on 30 July. This included:

‘3. Dr Who inside the Spaceship (working title – 2 episodes) Dr Who and his companions find themselves facing a terrifying situation within the ship itself.’[70]

‘We’d spent too much and we had to recoup some money,’ Lambert told Doctor Who Magazine – confirming what’s in the paperwork. ‘We made the decision that if we could find a good, claustrophobic story inside the TARDIS, then we’d be better to do a two-parter and save money there than have to start scrimping and saving on serials coming up.’[71] So what she told TARDIS in 1976 hadn’t been wrong: it wasn’t only to save money.

Gaps in the Record

Once the two-part Serial C had been commissioned, the record gets a bit patchy. There continued to be grumbling from the design and servicing departments. Lambert was again not copied into some of their memos. There was discussion about the need to redesign the TARDIS to correct the original faults and make it less cumbersome and time-consuming to put up and take down in the studio. But little in the surviving paperwork refers specifically to the new Serial C.

We can speculate on reasons to explain this. Unlike other serials, there was no correspondence between the writer and story editor, as in this case they were the same person. Whitaker and Lambert also had adjacent offices, so could discuss ideas and issues in person rather than needing to send memos.

What’s more, October 1963 saw the beginning of ‘a series of outcries’ by the powerful Screenwriters’ Guild, now the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, about:

‘the BBC’s unfair treatment of writers and, in particular, the growing number of staff contributions to programmes […] The new story editors [a position created by Sydney Newman earlier in the year] came under special attack, not only for their dilatory handling of submitted material but for what the Guild called “shopping down the corridor”, i.e. commissioning each other to contribute to their programmes.’

Newman asked for the help of the BBC’s Script Unit to ‘check the Guild’s alarming statistics of recent programmes written by staff,’ as the rule was very clearly that:

‘they should be commissioned only when no suitable freelance author was available, and that they should be patently better in quality and/or practicability than any script a freelance author could provide in the circumstances.’[72]

Given everything, I think Whitaker was entirely justified in writing the two-episode Doctor Who story – but he and Lambert might have kept quiet about what they were doing, and not committed too much to paper.

For three weeks, Serial C looked like it might mark the end of Doctor Who. On 21 November, Whitaker attended the press conference where the production team enthused about the new series. But the same day he wrote to Wilson, concerned about the continuing lack of decision on whether or not to extend the series beyond 13 episodes[73]. Wilson took this up with Baverstock and got a commitment the next day to a second batch of 13 episodes – 26 in total[74]. The first episode of Doctor Who was broadcast the following afternoon.

On 25 November, two memos from Lambert’s secretary, Valerie Speyer, were sent to Waris Hussein (director of An Unearthly Child), Christopher Barry and Richard Martin (directors of The Daleks) and ‘Miss P Russell’, suggesting that Paddy Russell had been assigned to direct Serial C[75]. I’ve not found any source to explain why Russell didn’t direct the serial, but perhaps it was due to the demands of her work directing My One True Love for the First Night (1963-64) strand of original plays (broadcast 14 March 1964). She later made her debut on Doctor Who as director of The Massacre (1966).

Then the fortunes of Doctor Who suddenly changed. When the Daleks made their debut at the end of December, the series became a big hit, with a notable increase in what were already good viewing figures. Even so, the response from BBC management was a little mixed. On 31 December, Baverstock suggested that he’d actually so far committed to only 20 episodes, with options on the four lead actors for another six. Having now viewed the final episode of The Daleks, weeks in advance of broadcast, he criticised the logic and inventiveness of scripts – but confirmed a further extension to the series, this time to 36 episodes[76].

On 2 January 1964, Jo Parks, an assistant in Television Enterprises, the department that organised sales of TV programmes abroad, wrote to the BBC’s Assistant Head of Copyright to ask for information about Serial C, the title given as ‘Inside the Spaceship’, as she could find nothing about it herself – suggesting that there was never much paperwork relating to the serial[77]. Perhaps as a result of this request, on 6 January David Whitaker supplied a one-paragraph synopsis of the serial, which was then to be wholly directed by Richard Martin, along with synopses of Marco Polo and Serial E (at that point ‘The Hidden Planet’ by Malcolm Hulke)[78]. Wilson relayed this information to Baverstock and Newman the following day[79].

On 9 January, the script for the first episode of Serial C was rewritten, with pages 3, 15-16, 18-20 and 25-26 amended, and new pages 14a, 17a and 21a inserted. I think that must have been in response to now lost notes from director Richard Martin, who (as we’ve seen) also wrote extensive notes on The Daleks. There are no such rewrites in the script for the second episode, ultimately directed by Frank Cox. ‘I didn’t actually work on the scripts,’ Cox says on the DVD commentary for a later Doctor Who episode he directed. ‘Verity would have negotiated rewrites and things. I simply got the finished script and did it to the best of my ability.’[80]

Based on the weekly production schedule, rehearsals for ‘The Edge of Destruction’ began at 10.30am on Monday 13 January at the regular venue: the Territorial Drill Hall, 239 Uxbridge Road. Based on what happened on other serials, we can assume that the cast received the scripts for both episodes before they began rehearsing the first of them. The first day probably began with the cast – just the four regulars – sitting round a table with director, producer and story editor to read the script aloud and discuss it. Lambert and Whitaker would then have left Martin and the cast to block out scenes, working out how to frame action with four cameras. The same day, Jo Parks was informed that Lambert had completed a staff contribution to programmes (SCTP) form on behalf of Whitaker writing Serial C, for which he would receive a standard guild-approved contract and fee for work done outside his day job[81].

Rehearsals continued through the week. Lambert, and perhaps Whitaker too, attended a ‘producer’s run’, usually on the Wednesday. Martin told DWM that given the episode was a ‘budget limitation exercise’, he could really only ‘keep the regulars occupied and produce the goods’, though he’d ‘experimented with exciting ways of shooting the [TARDIS] set.’[82]

The surviving script for the episode tells us that camera rehearsals began at Studio D at Lime Grove at 10.30am on Friday 17 January, with lunch between 1 and 2pm. Camera rehearsals continued until 3.45pm when there was a tea break and photo call. Camera rehearsals continued from 4.15 until 7pm, when cast and crew had an hour for supper. Camera line-up took place between 8 and 8.30pm, and videotape recording was scheduled from 8.30 to 9.45pm. The camera script reveals there were, 13 scenes and 118 individual camera shots with four scheduled recording breaks before the closing credits rolled.

Rehearsals for ‘The Brink of Disaster’ would have begun at 10.30am on Monday 20 January. Director Frank Cox had spent 18 months as a floor assistant before taking the BBC’s six-week director’s course, his sole credit before joining Doctor Who an episode of Star Story (1964) in which Brian Blessed read a story – The Bike by Allan Sillitoe – to children (and on which Cox’s name was misspelled on the credits[83]). Cox found rehearsing his first Doctor Who episode tough, but:

‘I was too young and inexperienced to know whether the problems I had at rehearsals were my fault or the result of production difficulties such as you suggest. All I remember was that I had to write the camera script before beginning rehearsals, and that William Hartnell seemed to me to hate rehearsing; he had a great problem learning the lines and if he found a biggish speech, of half a page or so, he would say, “Christ, Bloody Macbeth!”’

He singled out William Russell, playing Ian, as a great help in ‘mediating between the irascible old Hartnell and the trembling novice director, Cox. It was all a nightmare, quite honestly.’[84]

Russell remembered the story more fondly. ‘I thought it was extremely imaginative [and] gave you little windows into your character and showed our characters in totally different ways.’ He liked the ambiguity and openness to suggestion, and was impressed by Carole Ann Ford’s performance[85]. Comparing the camera script for the second episode to the broadcast version shows how many lines – and how much of the deduction – were originally written for Ian but given over to Barbara, suggesting that rehearsals involved more active engagement with the script than Cox implied. It’s easy to see why the cast might have relished some of the dramatic potential of the episode, such as the moment when Barbara rounds on the Doctor after weeks of frustration, and leaves the old man speechless.

‘Accuse us? You ought to go down on your hands and knees and thank us! But gratitude’s the last thing you’ll ever have – or any sort of common sense either.’

[Barbara, ‘The Brink of Disaster’]

On 21 January, paperwork prepared on behalf of Richard Martin confirmed details from the recording of the first episode: its runtime was 25 minutes and 4 seconds, special effects were provided by Shawcraft Ltd and the incidental music used four cues from Eric Siday’s Musique Electronique[86] This information was then included in the ‘Programme as Broadcast’ form for the episode[87].

Recording of ‘The Brink of Disaster’ on 24 January followed the same schedule as the first episode. That same day, Whitaker wrote to Moris Farhi, a prospective writer for Doctor Who, with pointers including ‘a rule that nobody must go inside the space ship except the Doctor, Susan, Ian or Barbara,’ and that ‘Doctor Who cannot be specific about the philosophy of his time machine.’[88] The evening’s recording was a lot simpler than the previous week: the running order in the camera script lists a single recording break, just four scenes and 91 shots before the credits.

‘The Edge of Destruction’ was broadcast on Saturday 8 February 1964, beginning one second after the scheduled 5.15pm[89]. The following Monday, Lambert’s SCTP form for Whitaker to write the serial was approved, at an agreed fee of 250 guineas per episode, or £525 in total. Whitaker’s contract was issued the same day. An undated memo by Whitaker explains how the sum was agreed: Coburn and Lucarotti had both been paid £225 per episode, Nation 250 guineas per episode for his first serial and £275 for his second, Hulke 250 guineas. Whitaker added that his work on Serial C was done in his own time, outside and without prejudicing his staff job[90].

On 12 February – the same day that Whitaker met the deputy editor of Frederick Mueller Ltd, who was interested in publishing Doctor Who books – the senior management at the BBC’s weekly Television Programme Planning Committee raised an issue with ‘The Edge of Destruction’: Kenneth Adam thought the incident with the scissors might have broken the BBC’s own code on violence[91]. The following day, head of family programmes Doreen Stephens wrote to Newman to make the same point[92].

The same day, Lambert’s secretary alerted her to a query from the costings department about over-spending on special effects for both The Daleks and Serial C, with contracts for outside suppliers not matching the budget allocations. One of the suppliers was named: Tom Taylor charged £20 for work on ‘The Brink of Disaster’[93].

On 17 February, Newman replied to Doreen Stephens saying Wilson was away but would contact her on his return; Newman also forwarded Stephens’complaint to Wilson[94]. A week later, Norman Rutherford, Newman’s deputy, issued all producers, directors and story editors with the rules on staff contributions to programmes, surely in response to the concerns raised by the Screenwriters’ Guild[95]. Wilson wrote to Stephens two days later, suggesting they meet[96]. Some sources claim Lambert was made to write an apology to Stephens, but I’ve found no evidence of this. (In fact, Stephens didn’t think all depictions of violence were bad; on another occasion she warned of children ‘brought up in cushioned innocence’[97].)

In March, Whitaker wrote to viewer Keith Williams, who had missed ‘The Brink of Disaster’. ‘I am afraid I cannot send you a script,’ said Whitaker, ‘but I can tell you that Doctor Who found himself in the middle of the birth of a solar system, but he was able to extricate himself just in time and save his friends from death.’[98]

On 11 August, JV Beesley in Copyright confirmed that Serial C had been sold for broadcast in Australasia, for which Whitaker would receive 25% of his original fee of 250 guineas per episode[99]. On 25 November, a payment slip was issued to Whitaker for sale of the serial to Canada, with 35% of his original fee[100]. A form was issued for the sale of the story to Malta and Singapore on 12 April 1965, the fee confirmed as 50% of Whitaker’s original fee 17 days later. Forms show sales to Gibraltar, Aden and Trinidad in May, and to Bermuda and Nigeria in June, in both cases for 50% of the original fee. In September it was Nigeria, Cyprus and Barbados, in November Hong Kong. In January 1966 the story was sold to Ghana, in March to Jamaica and Zambia, in July to Kenya, in October to Thailand. In January 1967, the serial was sold to Mauritius and Venezuela, in April to Sierra Leone, in October to Tunisia and other African countries[101]. In March 1968 there was a sale to Morocco, and another fee issued in August covered the far east and south-east Asia. At the end of the year, BBC Television Enterprises noted that the rights to the serial were due to expire on 14 February 1969 and sought an extension of five years[102]. Whitaker’s agent, Beryl Vertue at ALS, agreed this on 1 January 1969.

That’s where the paperwork in the WAC files on Whitaker comes to an end, but there were then sales to Iran, Jordan, Libya, Ethiopia and Costa Rica, with a screening in Algeria in January 1974 just before the extended rights expired[103]. We could go on: there was a new rights agreement to broadcast the episodes, a novelisation of The Edge of Destruction and releases of the episodes on video and DVD…

But my interest is really in the story itself, how it came to be and what it actually means. And the surviving paperwork doesn’t tell that story – or at least not directly. So let’s take this bedrock of established fact and see what we can build on it. To begin with, I have five theories about the story…

[1] Vincent-Rudzki, Jan, ‘An Interview with Verity Lambert’, TARDIS vol 1, no 7 (June 1976), p13.

[2] Vincent-Rudzki, Jan, and Payne, Stephen, ‘The Raymond Cusick Interview: Part Two’, TARDIS vol 2, no 4 (22 May 1977), p7.

[3] Bentham, Jeremy, email to author, 16 January 2023. Bentham still has his notebook.

[4] Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special, p9; Dicks, Terrance, and Hulke, Malcolm, The Making of Doctor Who, p54.

[5] Bentham, email to author, 16 January 2023.

[6] Uncredited authors of ‘Technical Observations’ in the fanzine An Adventure in Space and Time #3 (1980), p9.

[7] Bentham, email to author, 16 January 2023.

[8] Marson, Richard, ‘Whitaker’s World of Doctor Who’, DWM #98 (1985) p36.

[9] Marson, Richard, email to author, 4 February 2023.

[10] Bentham, The Early Years, pp54-55. The number of script pages cited is notable. The surviving camera scripts are 40 pages and 31 pages respectively, including title pages and running order of scenes. Is it likely that Whitaker, whose job as story editor was to ensure scripts ran to time, would have overwritten by so much?

[11] Lee, Hermione, Body Parts, p135. Lee cites an example from Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot by Carole Seymour-Jones (Constable, 2001), where theory (‘Is it legitimate to ask whether Tom [i.e. TS Eliot] set Vivien up for her disgrace?’) hardens into fact within a space of three pages: ‘In engineering Vivien’s fall, Tom cleared the decks for the future’.

[12] McLachlan, Ian K, ‘Another Step in the Right Direction: Frank Cox’, TARDIS vol 7 no 1 (1982), p5.

[13] Moore, Alex, ‘A Good Sense of Direction’, TARDIS vol 17 no 5 (2023), p26. I’m grateful to Alex Moore for sharing an early version of this article with me and for answering my queries.

[14] ‘Over the Edge: The Story of The Edge of Destruction’, included in the DVD set of the first 13 episodes, Doctor Who: The Beginning (2006).

[15] Marson, Richard, ‘Carole Ann Ford Interview’, DWM #86 (March 1984), p18.

[16] ‘Looking for David’. Doctor Who: The Collection – Season 2 (2022).

[17] CE Webber, ‘Science Fiction’, 29 March 1963, WAC T5/648/1 Doctor Who General B.

[18] Head of Children’s Programmes Owen Reed referred to ‘MR. WHO?’ in a memo to Donald Wilson, the earliest surviving written reference to Doctor Who (WAC T5/648/1 General B).

[19] Wilson, Donald, Webber, CE, and Newman, Sydney, ‘Dr Who General Notes on Background and Approach For an Exciting Adventure – Science Fiction Drama Series for Children’s Saturday Viewing, prepared by Donald Wilson, CE Webber, Sydney Newman’, one draft undated, one draft 15 May 1963 and two drafts 16 May 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[20] Wilson, Webber and Newman, ‘Dr Who General Notes on Background and Approach For an Exciting Adventure - Science Fiction Drama Series for Childrens Saturday Viewing’, draft dated 16 May 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[21] Interviewed by Frank Gillard, 29 August 1984; see ‘Interview with Sydney Newman’, The Oral History of the BBC.

[22] Cited in a memo by administrator Ayton Whitaker about studio facilities, 31 May 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[23] Wilson’s covering note to Newman of 4 June survives as well as the undated, uncredited three-page synopsis, with Newman’s handwritten notes on it (4 June 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B) Both were published in Hearn, Marcus, ‘The Giants’, DWM #209 (January 1994), pp34-37.

[24] Newman to Wilson, 10 June 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[25] Levin to Spicer, 13 June 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[26] John Mair, senior assistant planning (I), to Kenneth Adam, controller of programmes, 13 June 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[27] John Mair, senior assistant planning (I), to Assistant Controller (Planning) [Joanna Spicer], 18 June 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[28] Webber’s scripts for the first and second episodes of Doctor Who – however much of them he completed – are now lost. Yet a ‘programme as recorded’ document for the first episode to go into production, ‘An Unearthly Child’, names both Coburn and Webber as authors (WAC T5/648/1 General B), while an undated list of costs for the pilot episode gives copyright fees of £225 for Coburn and £135 for Webber, suggesting the proportion of Webber’s material that made it to recording (WAC T5/638 Serial A ep 001).

[29] Detailed by Lambert in a memo to Wilson, ‘Dr Who - Allocation of Designer’, 16 July 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[30] Reported in memo from Wilson to Baverstock, 10 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[31] Ayton Whitaker to Assistant to HSMTel(I), 1 July 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[32] Verity Lambert to Wilson, 16 July 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[33] Nation, Bowen and Bullmore are listed in David Whitaker, ‘Story Editor’s report’, 12 July 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[34] Verity Lambert to Wilson, 16 July 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[35] Reported in memo from Wilson to Baverstock, 10 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[36] Wilson to HTelDesign, 17 July 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[37] John Mair to Acting Establishment Officer, 29 July 1963, T5/648/1 General B.

[38] Whitaker to assistant head of copyright John Henderson, 8 August 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[39] David Whitaker to drama group administrator Ayton Whitaker, 8 August 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[40] See deck5, ‘Original 1963 Peter Brachacki TARDIS Set Drawings’.

[41] Date given by Coburn’s son Stef Coburn, interview with author, 16 November 2022.

[42] Wilson to Newman, 12 August 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B

[43] Newman to Wilson, 13 August 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[44] Lambert to FJ Bould, 22 August 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[45] Taylor, ‘Now She’s Kissed Adam Faith, Carol [sic] Flies Off’, News of the World, 1 September 1963, p13.

[46] For example, ‘“TWTW” Returns as Gadfly from our Special Correspondent Blackpool’ in The Times and ‘New BBC Schedule’ in the Television Mail of 13 September; ‘Television Notebook’ in the Birmingham Mail on 16 September; ‘There’s a “Think Big” Trend at BBC-TV, Notably in Drama Area’ in the US trade newspaper Variety on 19 September.

[47] Cook, Terence, Acting Drama Organiser, to Alan Shallcross, 19 September 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[48] Whitaker, 17 September 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[49] Lambert to Wilson, 23 September 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[50] ‘Script Position’, probably written by Whitaker, 27 September 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[51] Cited in Kibble-White, Graham, ‘”Who Was Anthony Coburn?” (Part Two)’, DWM #468 (December 2013), p55. I'll go into more depth on what happened in the forthcoming Guerrier, Simon, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television (2023).

[52] Holmes, NS, Senior Administrative Assistant, Scenic Services to Drama Organiser, 25 September 1963, WAC T5/638 Serial A ep 001.

[53] Reported in memo from Wilson to Baverstock, 10 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[54] ‘Financial commitment’ on scripts, probably written by David Whitaker, 30 September 1963, T5/648/1 General B. For clarity, I’ve added some additional known details of these stories.

[55] Whitaker, Ayton, ‘Serials Department Directors’, 8 October 1963, WAC T5/2,239/6 Drama Memos 1963.

[56] Lambert to Wilson, 8 October 1963, WAC T5/638 Serial A ep 001.

[57] Wilson to Baverstock, 10 October 1963, WAC T5/648-1 General B.

[58] Mair to Baverstock, 14 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[59] Note for file by ‘JRS/JH’ to Sydney Newman, 16 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[60] Assistant, Costing, Scenic Services, to Design Manager re ‘Design Costs for Production Dr Who’, 17 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[61] Baverstock to Newman, ‘Dr Who’, 18 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[62] Spicer to Elwyn Jones, Head of Series, ‘Drama Series: Thursday Placing’, 18 October 1963, WAC T5/2,239/6 Drama Memos 1963.

[63] Barry to Whitaker, 18 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[64] Mudie, JF, Head of Scenic Servicing, Television, to Spicer, ‘Dr Who’, 30 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[65] Spicer to Wilson, ‘Dr Who’, 23 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[66] ‘The Cave of Skulls’, recorded 25 October 1963.

[67] Verity Lambert and Valerie Speyer, ‘Dr Who – Costs of Pilot & Episodes A1, 2, 3 & 4’, 24 October 1963, WAC T5/638 Serial A episode 1

[68] JF Mudie, Head of Scenic Servicing, Television, to Spicer, ‘Dr Who’, 30 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[69] Spicer to Kenneth Adam, ‘Dr Who’, 30 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[70] Lambert and Speyer, ‘Amendment to Promotional Material: Dr Who dated 30th July, 1963’, 1 November 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B. Note that this document is dated 1 November 1963 at the foot of page 2, but some sources mistakenly take the date 30 July as given in the title.

[71] Griffiths, Peter, ‘Woman’s Realm’, DWM #235 (1996), p39.

[72] Wade, ‘Where the Difference Began – Some Developments in Scripts and Script Sections in BBC Television, 1936-74’ (1975), p28.

[73] Whitaker to Wilson, ‘Confidential’, 21 November 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[74] Baverstock to Wilson, ‘Dr Who’, 22 November, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[75] Lambert to the directors, ‘Scenic projection: Dr Who’, and Pinfield to the directors (though not including Martin), ‘Dr Who: Transfers’, both 25 November 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[76] Baverstock to Elwyn Jones, Head of Series, ‘Dr Who’, 31 December 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[77] Parks Jo, Sales Assistant in Television Enterprises, to Assistant Head of Copyright re ‘Dr Who Part C: Inside the Spaceship’, 2 January 1964, WAC David Whitaker Copyright File 2 1963-67.

[78] Whitaker to Wilson, ‘Doctor Who’, 6 January 1964, WAC T5/648/2 General

[79] Wilson to Baverstock and Newman, ‘Doctor Who’, 7 January, WAC T5/648/2 General.

[80] Cox on DVD commentary for ‘Kidnap’ (The Sensorites episode 5), 2012.

[81] Parks to Assistant Head of Copyright, ‘Dr Who Part C: Inside the Spaceship’, 2 January 1964, WAC David Whitaker Copyright File 2 1963-67

[82] Griffiths, Peter, ‘The Dalek Factor’, DWM #232, p48.

[83] ‘I was so shy that when the credits rolled over the screen, I averted my eyes modestly as my name came up for the first time as a director, and failed to notice that it was misspelled. So my first ever screen credit was as Frank Fox!’- McLachlan, ‘Another Step in the Right Direction’, p5

[84] McLachlan, ‘Another Step in the Right Direction’, p5.

[85] ‘Over the Edge’.

[86] Anon, ‘Dr Who Serial C, Ep 1’, 21 January 1964, WAC David Whitaker Copyright File 2 1963-67.

[87] ‘Television Service: Saturday: 8.2.1964’ (Programme As Broadcast form).

[88] Whitaker to Farhi, 24 January 1964, WAC T48/242/1 Moris Farhi.

[89] ‘Television Service: Saturday: 8.2.1964’.

[90] Anon (but surely Whitaker), ‘Scale Payments for Guidance’, undated, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[91] Minutes of BBC Television Programme Planning Committee, 12 February 1964, WAC microfiche.

[92] Stephens to Newman, ‘Drama Programmes for Children’, 13 February 1964, WAC T5/2,239/7 Drama Memos 1964.

[93] Speyer to Lambert, 13 February 1964, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[94] Newman to Stephens and Newman to Wilson, 17 February, WAC T5/2,239/7 Drama Memos 1964.

[95] Rutherford, ‘Staff Contributions to Programmes’, 24 February 1964, WAC T5/2,239/7 Drama Memos 1964.

[96] Wilson to Stephens, ‘Drama Programmes for Children’, 26 February 1964, WAC T5/2,239/7 Drama Memos 1964.

[97] Cited in Briggs, Asa, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume V – Competition (1995), p347.

[98] Whitaker to Williams, 17 March 1964, WAC T5/649 Viewers Letters 1964.

[99] Beesley, 11 August 1964, WAC David Whitaker Copyright File 2 1963-67.

[100] WAC David Whitaker Copyright File 2 1963-67.

[101] All from WAC David Whitaker Copyright File 2 1963-67.

[102] All from WAC Radio Contributions, WHITAKER, David, Copyright file 3 1968-1969 RCONT18/.

[103] See ‘Inside the Spaceship’, BroaDWcast, for further detail.

PART TWO – BEYOND THE BRINK

What We Can Deduce About Serial C

‘We’ll try it, but we’re clutching at straws.’

[The Doctor, ‘The Brink of Disaster’]

The Quick and the Odd

As we have seen, one persistent claim made to explain the oddness of Serial C is that it was written very quickly as a last-minute stopgap. In fact, Whitaker had months to produce his scripts. The decision to accept an initial run of 13 episodes was made on 16 October 1963, meaning there was a fortnight to consider possible storylines before ‘Inside the Spaceship’ was added to the schedule on 1 November.

We know draft scripts must have been completed by 9 January, when Whitaker undertook rewrites. In fact, we can narrow down dates a little further. Surviving paperwork shows that ‘design information’ – i.e. a draft script from which the design department could work up drawings for the sets – was due for the final episode of The Daleks on 12 December 1963, 22 days ahead of recording the episode on 10 January[1]. Design information for the first episode of Serial C was surely due one week later, on 19 December. Whitaker therefore had 48 days – more than six weeks – from the two episodes being added to the schedule to his scripts being ready for design. By comparison, Terry Nation was commissioned early the following year to deliver six episodes of Serial E, The Keys of Marinus, in just four weeks[2]. That is writing quickly.

Of course, Whitaker had other work to do at the same time. There were still rewrites to complete on The Daleks; on 31 October, director Richard Martin sent three pages of notes on the latest draft of episode 5 of that story – which he didn’t even direct[3]. There were surely also notes on the same episode from Christopher Barry (who did direct it), and from both directors on the subsequent two episodes of the story. Then there was work to be done on incoming draft scripts of Marco Polo, readthroughs and rehearsals to attend, and efforts to promote Doctor Who generally before its first episode was broadcast on 23 November. It’s likely that Whitaker, as story editor, was at least involved if not responsible for supplying billings information to Radio Times each week, and he may have written the radio trailer for the series recorded on 21 November. The fact that he seems to have reworked the first two episodes of The Daleks at home over the weekend of 19 and 20 October suggests he was under pressure to get the typing done.

But maybe Whitaker wanted to write his two episodes quickly. He told the Kensington Post earlier the same year that The Congress at Vienna (1815), a 40-minute production broadcast in May 1958, was ‘the best thing I have written so far’ but had taken just three days to write; this was, said the article, ‘on average, the time it takes him to write most works.’ Whitaker added that, ‘It needed very little revision, as I knew all the historical background. Generally this applies to every work.’ The article even gave a reason why he might have revised the scripts of The Daleks at home: it says he wrote ‘best in the early hours,’ Whitaker adding, ‘I find that I can only write when the surroundings are congenial.’[4]

Whitaker wasn’t alone in writing fast. Terry Nation said that he wrote the scripts for The Daleks, ‘very quickly – one a day,’ as he’d been offered a ‘more exciting’ job in Sweden, working with comedian Eric Sykes[5]. But one reason Nation could do this was that, as with Whitaker and The Congress at Vienna, he’d already worked out the story in detail. Nation’s 26-page storyline for the serial survives and having been commissioned for scripts based on this storyline, Nation then produced an even more detailed document: ‘the best scene-by-scene breakdown I’ve ever read,’ said Whitaker. ‘As I sat in my office and studied the pages, the characters grew in front of my eyes, the situations opened up like flowers in the sun and the total effect was a riot of colourful imagination.’[6] This thrilling scene-by-scene breakdown, which surely made the case for expanding the serial from six episodes to seven, is no longer known to survive.

Perhaps Whitaker also produced a storyline and scene breakdown for Serial C before beginning his scripts. Such documents would have been useful for Lambert in her efforts to convince her superiors that she had budgets under control, and to give the design and servicing departments as much notice as possible of what was to come – and no excuse not to deliver. But nothing survives of such documents, and there’s no reference to them, either. Jo Parks could find no information on the serial even when it was about to go into production. So I think any storyline and breakdown were all in Whitaker’s head.

Whatever the case, all evidence points to Serial C being written quickly, perhaps even at the rate of one episode a day – but on purpose, as Whitaker’s usual method, not because of pressure of time. There are benefits from such a short, sustained writing period. The writer can keep the whole story in their head, and the speed of writing may translate into pace and energy on the page. Everyone else – the director, producer and crew – gets to see what the story involves quickly, even if revisions are then made. Perhaps the result of such hasty writing was scripts that felt odd and illogical. But there was time to fix that. We know that the episode ‘The Edge of Destruction’ was rewritten, because the surviving camera script includes amendments made on 9 January 1964. But something else about this document reveals how the story was revised.

Again, to understand this we need to look at the production of other Doctor Who serials. Rehearsal scripts survive for five of the seven episodes of the preceding serial, The Daleks. The title page of rehearsal scripts typically lists the names of the crew and the schedule for rehearsal and recording. In the script itself, stage directions and dialogue are arranged on the right-hand side of each page, leaving the left-hand side blank, thus allowing for notes to be added. By the time the episode went into studio for recording, the rehearsal script was superseded by a camera script. The title page of a camera script typically lists the crew and the schedule for recording – but no details of rehearsals. There’s then a ‘running order’: a table listing the sequence in which scenes will be recorded, the number of individual camera shots, and which cameras and microphone booms will be needed. Recording breaks and other information might also be included. In the script itself, the previously blank left-hand side of each page now contains cues for the different cameras and boom operators. These cues would also be written up as a series of cue cards for the camera crew to work from during recording. Where we have both a rehearsal script (produced ahead of rehearsals) and camera script (produced during or after rehearsals) for the same episode, we can compare them to spot lines of dialogue and other details amended during rehearsals by the director and cast.

Only camera scripts survive for the two episodes of Serial C, but there’s something odd about them. In the script for Scene 6 of ‘The Edge of Destruction’, stage directions describe Susan ‘holding [a] pair of scissors in her hand.’ When Ian steps towards her, Camera 4 was to de-focus for a moment, then ‘clarify Ian. Susan drops the scissors and falls along the bed.’[7] Yet in the episode as broadcast, there’s no de-focusing of Ian and a series of things happens that are not described in the script: a quick cut to Camera 1 for a close-up of Susan, then a cut back to the wide two-shot as Susan jabs the scissors menacingly at Ian, after which Susan seems to struggle with some inner force and stop herself attacking Ian, instead repeatedly stabbing the scissors into a bed while dramatic music plays.

Normally, any discrepancy between a camera script and the programme as broadcast indicates a last-minute change, perhaps made on the day of recording. That would suggest the cast and crew were still trying to make sense of and fix the script right up to the last minute. But the amended scene doesn’t clarify anything; it’s stranger and more shocking than the written version, and it’s a big change to make so late in the day. What’s more, Frank Cox recalled that he had to prepare his camera script for ‘The Brink of Disaster’ before the start of rehearsals[8]. I think Richard Martin did the same on the first episode, and that these camera scripts for Serial C were what was used during rehearsals. That would mean there was time for the cast and director to discuss and consider this scene with the scissors before making the conscious decision that the episode should be odder than Whitaker wrote it to be. He’s the credited writer but not the sole author of this story.

Absurd theory #1: The first draft of Serial C was written very quickly, but that’s not why it’s so odd; the cast and crew took time to make it more peculiar.

It Must Have Been Made By a Giant

In fact, much of what happens in Serial C can be explained by understanding what the production team needed it to do. Obviously, it had to save money, and did so by making best use of the existing TARDIS interior set and not featuring any guest actors. But there’s also the fact that, at least between 1 and 22 November 1963, this serial was required to work as an ending to Doctor Who.

A number of things follow from this. First, Whitaker seems to have been keen to deliver on Sydney Newman’s original intentions for the series. As we’ve seen, Newman envisaged that opening story ‘The Giants’ would teach children about size. The production team were still keen to tell this story – and ultimately did, as Serial J, Planet of Giants. But with the series potentially ending abruptly after 13 episodes and no technical facilities available within that run to achieve the miniaturisation effects, Whitaker developed a story that would fulfil Newman’s ambition to dramatise proportion and size, only much more simply. As Dr Martin Wiggins says in his production subtitles for ‘The Brink of Disaster’ on the DVD release, Whitaker’s denouement, ‘comes at the same issue [in] a different way by positing the enormous impact of a tiny, seemingly insignificant phenomenon,’ i.e. the broken spring inside the fast return switch.

But it’s not just the spring. We discover towards the end of ‘The Brink of Disaster’ that all the strange goings-on are the result of the TARDIS trying to warn the Doctor and his companions that its power is being attracted away at a perilous rate by what the Doctor calls the ‘force of a total solar system’. We’ll get on to the scientific terminology later, but the implication is that this force is massive and powerful. Yet the Doctor immediately goes on to tell us that outside the TARDIS, ‘atoms are rushing towards each other, fusing, coagulating, until minute little collections of matter are created. And so the process goes on and on until dust is formed.’ The TARDIS faces destruction by something so minuscule that it doesn’t yet qualify as dust.

There’s another clue that Serial C owes a debt to Newman’s minuscule story early on in ‘The Edge of Destruction’ when the TARDIS doors open in flight. This is also what happens at the start of Planet of Giants, causing the miniaturisation of the crew, and the repetition is odd unless both serials drew from the same source. The brief synopsis of ‘The Giants’ given in the background notes to Doctor Who, and the longer, three-page synopsis for that story, don’t spell out why the TARDIS and its crew shrink to tiny size. But after the Doctor gives a ‘preview of what the ship will do’, we’re told ‘a policeman enters ship, astonished, goes out again and stares at outside; it dwindles before his eyes until it is one-eighth of an inch high by his boot’[9]. We can surely infer that the fleeing policeman leaves the doors of the ship open just as it begins flight, which is the cause of the miniaturisation. If so, I think that may have a bearing on the design of the TARDIS, which I’ll return to in Part Three. But let’s focus for now on what the doors opening in flight add to the story of Serial C.

It’s an uncanny thing to happen, and simple to realise in the studio. At the end of the story, Barbara deduces the real reason the doors opened, but for much of the story a more sinister possibility is suggested: that some invisible, malevolent entity has forced its way aboard. The working title of the story is surely a play on this idea of there being something inside the spaceship that shouldn’t be, the twist being that this something has been there all along.

Yet while drawing from ‘The Giants’ shows Whitaker trying to deliver on Newman’s original vision for Doctor Who, this suggestion of a malevolent force goes quite against what Newman wanted for his new series. The early outline of Doctor Who drafted in May 1963 made it clear that there were to be no ‘bug-eyed monsters’; when Webber included giant-sized spiders in his synopsis for ‘The Giants’, Newman objected that these were too much of the BEM school[10]. Famously, he was then ‘livid with anger’ on first learning about the Daleks[11]. Wilson also hated the Dalek serial when he first read the scripts, and called Whitaker and Lambert to see him. ‘He said, “This is absolutely dreadful [and] you’re absolutely not to do it,”’ Lambert later recalled. ‘So we just said, “Well, look, there’s really no alternative [serial]. We have to do this.”’[12] The timing of this altercation is important. It must have taken place just before or while Whitaker wrote Serial C, and before the Daleks made their screen debut and proved to be a hit with the audience. That means Lambert and Whitaker didn’t merely persist with the Daleks; they consciously added the suggestion of another BEM to Serial C.

Absurd theory #2: The Daleks changed the format of Doctor Who, turning it into a series about battles with monsters. But this didn’t happen because of audience reaction; the suggestion of an invisible invader in Serial C shows that Lambert and Whitaker had already made this shift, against the wishes of their superiors and before the Daleks appeared on screen.

Inside the Audience

Of course, audience reaction was still important. Two days before the recording of ‘The Edge of Destruction’, Whitaker, at Lambert’s request, sent Wilson the latest available figures for Doctor Who’s audience size and appreciation (given as a percentage based on a sample of audience members each providing a mark out of 10)[13]. These were just one means of gauging the impact of the Dalek serial: the BBC archives include enthusiastic letters from parents and children, enquiries from the press and from companies keen to produce Dalek merchandise, all carefully recorded and filed.

The production team acted swiftly on this reaction. Less than a week after Whitaker sent his memo to Wilson, and with the Dalek serial still on the air, Terry Nation met with Whitaker, Lambert and associate producer Mervyn Pinfield to discuss his next commission for the series. Plans to have Nation write a historical story, ‘The Red Fort’, were abandoned; instead, he agreed to produce a six-part science fiction adventure and deliver it in just four weeks so that it could follow immediately on from Marco Polo – Nation once again bumping Coburn’s ‘Robots’ story further down the schedule[14]. But note that at this point the production team didn’t want, or didn’t think their viewers wanted, a second Dalek story. They interpreted the enthusiastic response from their audience as a wish for stories in a similar style, but featuring new monsters. It took another month of unwaning interest in Daleks before Nation was asked for a sequel[15].

That’s not to suggest that the production team got it wrong. The lasting success of Doctor Who has surely been down to its succession of original monsters and the sparing use of sequels – the return of the Daleks as a special occasion, not the run of the mill. While the audience insisted that they wanted more Daleks, the production team knew better about what they’d actually respond to.

This approach to audience response was clearly led by Sydney Newman. As I said in the introduction, he wanted Lambert and other BBC colleagues to learn from what he called the ‘humiliating, funny, illuminating and humble-making’ academic study of children’s responses to an earlier science fiction serial he’d produced, so that Doctor Who would make an impact[16]. What’s more, he felt the lack of this kind of psychological insight into the audience at home explained the shortcomings of BBC drama when he first took charge of the department. ‘Perhaps worst of all,’ he recalled in his memoir, ‘the prestigious single play, as a weekly series, was chosen for production without anyone seeming to know what audience it was being aimed at.’ He poured particular scorn of the most prestigious of the BBC’s drama strands, the Sunday-Night Play (1957-63): ‘despite the excellence of many of its productions, the department assumed the audience want to see, week after week, an impossible melange of cultural appeal,’ with no consistency in choice of authors, subjects or styles, and little contemporary relevance. ‘Only the most ardent lovers of television drama would be loyal to that weekly fictional hash,’ Newman concluded[17].

Newman was taken on by the BBC because of his success overseeing rival ITV’s own Sunday-night drama output. The one-off plays shown under the title Armchair Theatre (1956-74) tended to be of more consistent feel and have greater contemporary relevance – but their appeal was down to more than that alone. One of Newman’s proteges at the time recalled that he’d remind them, modestly, at script meetings that, ‘The size of the audience was undoubtedly helped greatly by the fact that the programme followed Sunday Night at the London Palladium’ (1955-66)[18].

This long-running variety show had a well-established formula. A dance number and minor comic or musical acts was followed by a game in which members of the public would compete for prizes by completing amusing tasks within a time limit. There was then a commercial break, but viewers at home were encouraged to stay tuned by the promise of big-name stars in the second half – Judy Garland, Sammy Davis Jr and The Beatles all appeared in this period. But how, you ask, is that relevant to Doctor Who, and to Serial C?

Newman is generally regarded as bringing popular, commercial zest to the BBC’s drama output. But months before he even joined the BBC, David Whitaker identified similar elements that the BBC could draw from to get a better response to its drama output.

On 3 July 1962, Whitaker produced an 11-page report on the BBC’s Sunday-Night Play, which he was joining as script editor. He began by stating that viewing figures and audience appreciation often depended on the stars billed in advance for ITV’s Palladium show because, said Whitaker, viewers responded well to known quantities: big-name acts, established writers, even the structured format of the show each week, with the game show, then ad break, then stars.

Following from this, said Whitaker, the titles of drama plays could do more to prepare – and entice – the audience about the kind of thing they were in for; plays with ‘murder’ or ‘kill’ in their title had usually done well at this, he said. Rather than having free rein to write whatever they liked, writers should be guided on subject, theme and tone to fit with the rest of the series, adding consistency from week to week. They should write leading roles and guest parts to attract star-name actors, who in turn would draw an audience. And writers should be encouraged and supported on a long-term basis so that they wrote for the series more than once – again, adding consistency. Whitaker suggested other things, too, such as employing ‘AIDA’ (attention, interest, development, action) to grab, then hold, the viewer. But what’s striking is that in 11 pages on how to improve audience response to the Sunday-Night Play, he says nothing about what those plays should be about[19].

I think we can see Whitaker applying these ideas as story editor of the first year of Doctor Who. He established a recognisable and even tone to the episodes in his tenure. He shaped and honed writers’ storylines, encouraged the better writers to return for more serials, and got them writing roles for guest stars such as Alan Wheatley (best known as the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-59) and George Coulouris (a respected name on stage and in film, as well as in TV and radio, and the star of Newman’s earlier science fiction serial Pathfinders to Venus).

There’s another reason that Whitaker’s 11-page report illuminates what happens in Serial C. It is an imaginative leap into the minds of the audience, as if reaching through the TV set into their homes. It’s about not just understanding the psychology of the audience but affecting people’s behaviour. If you understand people’s need for assurance and you can also arouse interest, excitement and fear, you can keep them glued to the screen.

On 18 October 1963, just as Wilson and Newman were objecting to the Dalek storyline as being all wrong for Doctor Who, and Donald Baverstock said he’d take just 13 episodes of the series – necessitating a two-part filler story – the first episode of Doctor Who to be broadcast was recorded at Lime Grove. In it, the Doctor explains the TARDIS being bigger on the inside by analogy. ‘But you’ve discovered television, haven’t you?’ he says. ‘Then by showing an enormous building on your television screen, you can do what seemed impossible.’ In Serial C, the intelligence behind this television-like TARDIS uses human psychology to get a message across to people watching its screen, and conveys the message in a highly dramatic way to ensure they pay attention. Reading Whitaker’s 11-page paper, I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Absurd theory #3: The TARDIS manipulating the minds of its crew is an analogy for Whitaker (and Lambert) using human psychology to connect with their audience on the far side of the screen.

The Science of Destruction

In my previous book for the Black Archive series[20], I argued that – despite what some commentators have said – David Whitaker’s The Evil of the Daleks (1967) exhibits a pretty good grasp of real science.

I think there’s pretty good science in Serial C, too. The idea of a human crew at the mercy of a machine intelligence which behaves in a sinister manner that is actually governed by logic is a staple of science fiction. In Arthur C Clarke’s celebrated novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stanley Kubrick’s film of the same name (both 1968), the HAL 9000 computer overseeing a spaceship murders its crew because a new program conflicts with previous instructions[21]. In the Star Trek (1966-68) episode The Changeling (1967), a 21st-century space probe, Nomad, gains a kind of sentience and, while it thinks it is acting logically, endangers the crew of the Enterprise. The story and the simple explanation behind the probe’s behaviour was reworked as Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), suggesting the lasting potency of the idea.

That’s not to suggest Whitaker originated this kind of story, or inspired either Clarke or Star Trek. But Serial C fits within a larger tradition of science fiction stories generally regarded as scientifically literate. We know Whitaker consciously linked other Doctor Who serials to the famous robot stories of Isaac Asimov, which from the 1940s explored aspects of ‘robopsychology’, the study of the personalities and behaviour of intelligent machines. Whitaker’s The Power of the Daleks (1966) and The Evil of the Daleks both, for instance, make reference to Asimov’s ‘positronic’ robot brains.

Asimov’s robots, the Nomad probe and Hal could all speak and so enunciate their motives. But the plot of Serial C hinges on the fact that the TARDIS can’t speak directly to its crew and must instead convey an urgent warning by disturbing their minds. The effect of this appears more Gothic than scientific: a feeling increased by the visuals, with the TARDIS control room in relative darkness and Susan and Barbara wearing cowl-like costumes (whereas the script says Barbara is in an ‘attractive night robe’). The melting of the clock that stands on a pedestal inside the TARDIS control room has likewise been seen by some commentators as a poetic visual metaphor for time running out[22] – in the story and on Doctor Who generally, given the threat of cancellation. In a documentary about the making of the story, actress Carole Ann Ford likens the arresting imagery to the melting pocket watches seen in Salvador Dali’s surrealist painting The Persistence of Memory (1931)[23]. This famous work may well have inspired Whitaker, though there’s no surviving evidence to be sure.

Whether it did or not, Whitaker worked established elements of the TARDIS set into the plot of his serial: as well as the clock, he also makes use of the ‘fault locator’ introduced in The Daleks. In fact, in Whitaker’s story both these props are used to provide a measure of time: the melting clock cannot be trusted but the light on the fault locator provides a more reliable constant. And that’s not a Gothic touch; I think it’s Whitaker playing on some pretty high-end physics.

Einstein’s theory of special relativity provides an explanation of the way speed affects mass, time and space relative to the observer in ways that otherwise seem strange. For example, two identical clocks will give slightly different readings if one is located on the Earth’s surface and the other is in orbit, due to the relative effects of gravity. Something of this is surely referenced in the name TARDIS, which Susan explains in the first episode of Doctor Who is made up from the initials Time And Relative Dimension In Space; in the same episode, she can’t solve a simple maths problem without including time and space – as though any answer must be contingent on or relative to these dimensions. In calculations of relativity, the speed of light is assumed to be constant, and I think that’s what Whitaker is referencing in Serial C by using a light to convey the consistency of the TARDIS’ innate sense of time. Whitaker may also have been thinking of time as exerting a force just as, in Planet of Giants, ‘space pressure’ could affect the TARDIS and its crew.

If this is a little opaque in the episodes as broadcast, I’m not sure that’s the fault of the writer. We’ve seen that in rehearsals there were efforts made to make the story odder and more dramatic. In a podcast discussing ‘The Brink of Disaster’, Toby Hadoke suggests that the cast and director didn’t quite understand what Whitaker intended to convey about this consistent measure of time, so made the second instance of the light coming on shorter, to suggest time running out[24]. ‘The whole premise of time being taken away and given back was quite a difficult one,’ Lambert admits in the Over the Edge documentary. ‘I’m not sure how comprehensible we made it within the serial. But I think what would have held people was the conflict between the characters.’ That, it seems, was the priority.

Then there’s the scientific terminology used – or not used. There’s no mention of gravity or relativity, for all they could have been employed to give credence to what we see happening, and despite relativity being featured in the first episode of Doctor Who. Instead, Ian suggests a ‘magnetic force’ is operating on them, which the Doctor says would have to be ‘gigantic’. Then, at the end of ‘The Brink of Disaster’, the Doctor confirms that it has taken ‘the force of a total solar system to attract the power away from my ship.’

In Part Three we’ll explore why this would attract the TARDIS. For now, strictly speaking, ‘solar system’ means the system of gravitationally bound objects in orbit around one specific star – ‘Sol’, the Latin name of our Sun. Other stars may have ‘planetary systems’ in orbit round them, but only our system is ‘solar’. Coupled with the Doctor’s reference to ‘the planet Quinnis, of the fourth universe’, when ‘universe’ literally means everything there is, we might presume that Whitaker didn’t have a grasp of basic astronomical terms. Yet scientists involved in the study of real planets in orbit around other stars also use ‘solar system’ to mean planetary systems other than our own[25] – if not technically correct, ‘solar system’ gets the idea across simply. Besides, Whitaker was being consistent with the preceding serial, in which we’re told that Skaro, the home world of the Daleks, is the twelfth planet of ‘a solar system’ that is in turn surrounded by many other solar systems. In just a few lines of easily understood dialogue, a vast expanse of outer space is conveyed, making the universe of Doctor Who bigger and more boggling than the small screen could otherwise convey.

Absurd theory #4: There’s a good grasp of real science behind Serial C; ironically, this is obscured by efforts to convey such ideas in straightforward language.

A Switch in Time

As discussed already, Serial C is predicated on the huge impact caused by a tiny component – the spring inside a switch. Whitaker could have chosen any dial or control on the TARDIS console, but he created the ‘fast-return switch’. I think this particular gizmo was meant to achieve the original purpose of Serial C: to work as a conclusion to Doctor Who. But, in exploring that idea, we can also see Whitaker’s canny efforts to save the series from the brink of disaster.

In the closing moments of ‘The Rescue’, the final episode of The Daleks, the Doctor is at the controls of the TARDIS as he and his friends leave the planet Skaro. There is then an explosion and they are knocked to the floor, leading into next episode, ‘The Edge of Destruction’. Then, at the end of ‘The Brink of Disaster’, the Doctor tells us what he was doing when the explosion occurred: ‘I had hoped to reach your planet Earth. Skaro was in the future and I used the fast-return switch.’

Since we know Skaro is not in the same solar system as Earth, the fast-return switch must do more than simply return the TARDIS from the future; it also propels the ship through space. It doesn’t do this at random, as the Doctor has a particular planet in mind – which he reaches by the end of ‘The Brink of Disaster’. It seems safe to assume from all this that, though it’s not quite said explicitly on screen, the fast-return switch returns the TARDIS to a previous destination[26]. There’s no suggestion that the Doctor leaves Skaro at the end of The Daleks with the intention of returning to the TARDIS’ previous landing site, the Palaeolithic desert that he fled at the end of the first serial. But if the fast-return switch can return to the last-but-one destination, then the Doctor could take Ian and Barbara home to London in the 20th century, neatly bringing their adventures and the series to a close. Surely that was the starting point for this story, and everything else – the nascent solar system, the intrusion into the minds of the crew – all followed from it.

There is a clue that Whitaker intended to get Barbara and Ian home in the first words spoken in the serial: Barbara asks, ‘Mr Chesterton?’, an oddly formal way to address the man she normally addresses as ‘Ian’. Susan also fails to recognise Ian, but his own first words in the serial reveal what is going on. ‘You’re working late tonight, Miss Wright,’ he says. The Doctor says Susan is suffering a ‘temporary lapse of memory’ but Ian and Barbara’s own memory loss serves to remind us of the lives – and careers – they both had before they stepped aboard the TARDIS. Ian’s first words here echo the first words he ever spoke in Doctor Who: ‘Oh, not gone yet?’ Had ‘The Brink of Disaster’ really been the last episode of Doctor Who, a little more could easily have been made of this: a mention of Coal Hill School and the junkyard on Totters Lane where they first encountered the Doctor – just enough to remind the viewers before the TARDIS returned there at the end of the serial (and series).

The broadcast version of ‘The Brink of Disaster’ has Susan and Barbara head out through the doors of the TARDIS onto a snowy plateau, of which we see very little – the small set being another cost-saving measure. This could easily have been substituted for Ian and Barbara heading out into a barely-glimpsed Totters Lane, reusing props and scenery from the first serial. With limited budget and studio space, I doubt the whole Totters Lane set would have been re-erected; just enough to give an impression of that space. And that would mean that Barbara and Ian leaving the TARDIS would have been seen from the perspective of the Doctor and Susan in the TARDIS; we, as viewers, would remain with them.

In the first episode of Doctor Who, Susan expressed a desire to remain in London of the 20th century, too. The tension between her wanting to continue travelling with her grandfather and yet also find somewhere in space and time to settle down would later be used to great dramatic effect in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964). Perhaps at the end of ‘The Brink of Disaster’ she might have persuaded the Doctor to stay in London, at least for a while. Yet there’s lots in Serial C as broadcast to underline that Susan and the Doctor are not from contemporary Earth, sharply contrasting these two alien travellers with the human schoolteachers. That’s notable because, after the recording of the pilot episode of Doctor Who in September 1963, Sydney Newman decreed that in the remounted version – the first episode of the series to be broadcast – the Doctor and Susan should be less weird and alien, more ordinary and relatable[27]. But in Serial C, Whitaker makes them more alien than ever. They even communicate telepathically with one another, excluding Ian and Barbara (and us) from whatever is ‘said’. They could not ‘return’ to normal life on contemporary Earth because, as this serial reminds us, they were never part of it. Therefore, I think it more likely that they would have continued their travels.

What’s more, something is done in this serial about the position of the Doctor in relation to the other lead characters. In ‘The Fire Maker’, the final episode of the first serial, there’s a key moment when Ian is asked if he leads the TARDIS crew. ‘No,’ he says, nodding at the Doctor. ‘He is the leader.’ Yes, the Doctor is the title character of the series but the drama in this scene depends on the fact that, at this point, Ian could be – perhaps even is – the leading figure in the group, but chooses to cede that authority. In contrast, at the end of ‘The Brink of Disaster’, the Doctor has a long speech in which he details exactly what’s happening. It’s beautifully played, atmospherically shot and framed, and the first big ‘hero’ speech for the title character. It’s as if, after being one of the ensemble in preceding weeks, the Doctor steps forward to take charge of Doctor Who.

This is of a piece with something else that happens in Serial C. Compare Susan’s comments in the second episode of the series, ‘The Cave of Skulls’, about the TARDIS normally being able to disguise itself. ‘It’s been an ionic column and a sedan chair,’ she says, the suggestion being that it – and she and her grandfather – have always gone unnoticed on their travels until Ian and Barbara discovered them. They were living a quiet, innocuous life until that discovery sparked these adventures. But in ‘The Edge of Destruction’, the Doctor refers to ‘the planet Quinnis, in the fourth universe’, which Susan says is ‘where we nearly lost the TARDIS, four or five journeys back.’ It’s a notable change, implying that she and her grandfather had adventures before the TV series began.

It may be that in the case of Quinnis, Whitaker drew from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – as he’d do again when he wrote Dalek stories some years later[28]. In the second ever Holmes story, The Sign of the Four (1890), there are references to work Holmes has been involved in without our narrator, Watson, such as the ‘Bishopgate jewel case’ and the time Holmes was consulted by Francois le Villard. The suggestion is that Holmes has been busy as a detective since Watson last shared an adventure with him, and that Holmes’s talents are well recognised. Something similar happens in the next story, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (June 1891), with references to ‘the Arnsworth Castle business’ and ‘Darlington substitution scandal’. But soon after this, in the story ‘The Five Orange Pips’ (November 1891), there’s something notably different.

Watson begins the story by referring to his own notes for the year 1887:

‘Among my headings under this one twelve months, I find an account of the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the Amateur Mendicant Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse, of the facts connected with the loss of the British barque Sophy Anderson, of the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa, and finally of the Camberwell poisoning case.’[29]

What’s different is that these are all cases in which Watson was involved: a tantalising prospect of many more adventures that he says he might ‘sketch out at some further date.’ Doyle continued to tease his readers in this way; he wrote 60 Holmes stories, which between them reference more than a hundred additional cases. It’s a promise of more thrills to come.

That’s what I think is happening in the reference to Quinnis, and also in the scripted explanation for where the Doctor got the cape Ian wears at the end of the story. On screen, it’s from Gilbert and Sullivan – an amusing name-drop of two famous men – but the camera script says the cape belonged to Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who built the Suez Canal. There’s more of a story there, involving engineering and adventure. In this, and with Quinnis, by telling us that the Doctor and Susan have already had adventures prior to Barbara and Ian (and us) meeting them, the implication is that they will continue to have adventures after Barbara and Ian go home. That meant, even if Doctor Who had been cancelled after just 13 episodes, it could yet return, perhaps for a second batch of 13 episodes a year after the first.

There was a precedent for this. The adventure serial Garry Halliday had previously been broadcast in the same Saturday teatime slot later taken by Doctor Who. Each year of its four-year run featured 12 or 13 episodes split between two serials. Whitaker wrote two of the eight serials – a quarter of the run – and also asked Garry Halliday’s creators to write for Doctor Who[30]. So here’s an odd thought: the BBC might have cancelled Doctor Who after 13 episodes and then, because of audience response to the Daleks, brought it back for a second batch of 13 at the end of 1964. That would surely have seen the Daleks invade Earth, just as it did in our universe, but without Ian and Barbara – and Susan might have stayed aboard the TARDIS at the end. Perhaps, with the audience hooked on stories about bug-eyed monsters, the other half of this second ‘season’ of Doctor Who would have been some version of The Web Planet (1965).

But that wasn’t to be. By 22 November 1963, it was clear that ‘The Brink of Disaster’ would not be the final episode of Doctor Who. Yet Whitaker continued to slip references to tantalising unseen adventures into subsequent episodes – the Doctor and Susan taking shelter from zeppelins, or navigating the metal seas of Venus[31]. We’re told they fought Henry VIII, met Pyrrho and Beau Brummell, and faced the telepathic plants of Esto[32]. In The Sensorites, Susan gives the most tantalising example: ‘Oh, it’s ages since we’ve seen our planet. It’s quite like Earth but at night the sky is a burned orange and the leaves on the trees are bright silver.’[33] That does more than conjure a colourful world; Susan’s wistfulness hints at a story fundamental to the whole series – why did the Doctor leave home?

I think in part this kind of stuff is why Doctor Who endures: that suggestion of adventures, or wonders, we must imagine for ourselves. The industry of books, audio plays, comics and other media telling stories not seen on TV also owes a huge debt to that first reference to Quinnis. Apart from the creation of the Daleks themselves, only one other thing had a comparable impact in explaining the longevity of Doctor Who: the way, in 1966, that a change in lead actor managed to make the new Doctor so very different and yet the same. Of course, The Power of the Daleks was also written by Whitaker.

Absurd theory #5: Despite being asked to write The Edge of Destruction to kill off Doctor Who, David Whitaker wrote it so that the series might continue – and we still live with the result.

[1] Cottrell, Harry, Progress Desk, to Verity Lambert, undated schedule for Doctor Who Week 2 (i.e. episode B7, recorded 10 January 1964), WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[2] Whitaker to Wilson, ‘Episode Three Terry Nation serial… Robert Gould’, 26 March 1964, WAC T5/648/2 General.

[3] Hornsby, Meg, dictated by Martin, to Whitaker, ‘Dr Who, Serial B, Episode 5’, 31 October 1963, WAC T5/639/1 Serial B Episode 5.

[4] Huber M, ‘Meet the Man who Decides on BBC TV Play Scripts’, Kensington Post (1 February 1963), p2.

[5] Johnson, Andrew, ‘Terry Nation Talks about the Daleks and Survivors’, TARDIS no. 1 (1975), p9.

[6] Whitaker, David, ‘The Right Treatment’, The Screenwriter Quarterly no 14 (Winter 1963), p21.

[7] Camera script for ‘The Edge of Destruction’, p13.

[8] ‘All I remember was that I had to write the camera script before beginning rehearsals, and that William Hartnell seemed to me to hate rehearsing.’ (McLachlan, ‘Another Step in the Right Direction’ p5).

[9] Hearn, ‘The Giants’, p38.

[10] Newman to Wilson, ‘Dr Who: Synopsis of First Story: The Giants’, 10 June 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[11] ‘An Interview with Sydney Newman’, 29 August 1984.

[12] Turning Points, BBC Two, 15 January 1996.

[13] Whitaker to Wilson, ‘Doctor Who’, 15 January 1964, WAC T5/648/2 General.

[14] Whitaker to Wilson, ‘Episode Three [of] Terry Nation serial… Robert Gould’, 26 March 1964, WAC T5/648/2 General.

[15] The first surviving reference to a second Dalek story being in the works is Wilson’s response to John Grove, head of business at Television Enterprises, ‘Dr Who’, 24 February 1964, WAC T5/648/2 General; perhaps not coincidentally, this was just as Nation completed work on Serial E, The Keys of Marinus, all six scripts of which were accepted by Whitaker the following day; see Whitaker to Wilson, 26 March 1964.

[16] Lloyd et al, Under Observation (1963), p55. The study observed children as they watched ‘The Valley of the Monsters’, the seventh episode of Pathfinders to Venus (broadcast on 16 April 1961).

[17] Newman, Sydney, Head of Drama (2017), p356.

[18] Shubik, Irene, Play for Today (1975), p31. Shubik was, like Lambert, a protege of Newman, who followed him to the BBC. In November 1963, Shubik took over what had been David Whitaker’s office in TV Centre when he and the Doctor Who team moved to Threshold House.

[19] Whitaker, ‘Paper on Sunday Night Plays’, 3 July 1962, WAC T16/62/3 TV Policy Drama File 3 1959-64.

[20] Guerrier, Simon, The Black Archive #11: Evil of the Daleks (2017).

[21] This explanation, given in the novel, does not feature in the movie, and is not given onscreen until the sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984).

[22] For instance, Toby Hadoke in his Too Much Information podcast, episode 3.2, on Brink of Disaster.

[23] ‘Over the Edge’.

[24] Hadoke, Toby, Too Much Information podcast 3.2: The Brink of Disaster (20 September 2022).

[25] For example, in ‘We Seem To Be All on Our Own’, a column for the Daily Telegraph’s ‘Science and the Citizen’ column of 8 April 1963, Anthony Smith referred to ‘our solar system’ as opposed to ‘a solar system, say, 11 light years away’ (p17). More recently, in the Radio 4 science programme The Infinite Monkey Cage episode 25.3, Hunting for Exoplanets (first broadcast 26 November 2022), ‘solar system’ is used in this sense by both host Professor Brian Cox and Dr Jessie Christiansen from Caltech. Christiansen says: ‘Yes, science communicators do generically use “solar systems” to describe other planetary systems [as] it’s a familiar phrase that the general public already grok [understand].’ (Email to author, 8 February 2023).

[26] Though it never appears again on television, many subsequent Doctor Who novels, short stories, audio plays and comics have used the fast-return switch for this purpose; an early instance was in Steve Lyons’ novel The Witch Hunters (1998).

[27] Newman’s undated, handwritten notes on the ‘first run’ (the pilot episode) survive in WAC folder T5-648-1 General B. In 1988, he told DWM that the ‘dummy run […] didn’t work out right because Bill Hartnell’s characterisation was a bit too nasty and I thought he would put off the viewers’, while with Susan he had ‘wanted one character with whom my children’s audience could identify.’ (Auger, David, and Walker, Stephen James, ‘Back to Basics’, DWM #151 (October 1988) p14).

[28] See Guerrier, The Evil of the Daleks, especially the section ‘Sherlock Holmes vs the Daleks’, pp59-65.

[29] Conan Doyle, Arthur, ‘The Five Orange Pips’, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, p133. (Originally printed in Strand Magazine vol 2, issue 11 (November 1891).)

[30] In ‘Story Editor’s report’ dated 12 July 1963 (WAC T5-648-1 General B), David Whitaker says he requested storylines from Halliday creators Bowen and Bullmore (among others, including Terry Nation); Bowen told the fanzine Nothing at the End of the Lane in 2012 that they ‘couldn’t think of any’ story ideas.

[31] ‘Crisis’ (Planet of Giants episode 3); ‘The Singing Sands’ (Marco Polo episode 2).

[32] In ‘Strangers in Space’ (The Sensorites episode 1); ‘The Keys of Marinus’ (The Keys of Marinus episode 7); ‘Kidnap’ (The Sensorites episode 5); ‘The Unwilling Warriors’ (The Sensorites episode 2), respectively.

[33] ‘A Desperate Venture’ (The Sensorites episode 6).

PART THREE – INSIDE THE SPACESHIP

The Fifth Character In Serial C

‘The machine wasn’t at fault, we were… and it’s been trying to tell us so ever since.’

[Barbara, ‘The Brink of Disaster’ ]

The Girls’ Bedroom and Ian’s Bed

As we’ve seen, Serial C was commissioned to be a relatively inexpensive production requiring only the four regular cast members and – except for the final scene – the pre-existing TARDIS interior set. The first Doctor Who serial introduced the main control room with its central console, to which The Daleks added ‘living quarters’: an extension to one side of a slightly modified main control room set.

The camera script for ‘The Edge of Destruction’ suggests that David Whitaker intended to exploit and adapt this existing space, but not to add an extra room to the TARDIS. Although Scene 2 is headed ‘Int. The Girls’ Bedroom’, stage directions immediately after this say, ‘Susan now has a medical box open on the table in the living quarters’, so the bedroom was intended to be part of that pre-existing space. Stage directions continue that, ‘If possible one of the circular wall pieces should be open as if it is a cupboard.’ Then, in Scene 6, Ian also ‘goes to one of the walls. He presses a switch and three of the circular wall pieces descend and a wall bed is revealed.’ The implication is that Whitaker envisaged the living quarters – even the whole TARDIS control room – as a kind of bedsit: a single space with multiple functions. (He had form in this; on 30 September 1963 he agreed to rework the scripts of The Daleks to combine sets wherever practical to reduce their overall number[1].)

It also seems that he expected one of the existing wall sections of the TARDIS to be adapted for his story, just as he melted the existing clock prop. In advance of recording of the pilot episode of Doctor Who, Peter Brachacki produced three wall sections with distinctive vacuum-formed circles (usually referred to as ‘roundels’). One of these wall sections contained workable doors. These wall sections were expensive and time-consuming to construct, so three photographic blow-ups of them were also produced, allowing the size of the TARDIS interior to be increased with approximately the same effect[2]. Obviously, Whitaker’s idea of having a cupboard and beds emerge from roundelled walls wouldn’t have worked using the photographic blow-ups, and there surely wasn’t budget to create new wall sections with vacuum-formed roundels, so he must have intended some adaptation of the existing wall sections.

I think there are two possible reasons why that didn’t happen. One is that when Raymond Cusick, the designer assigned to Serial C, received ‘design information’ (that is, approved draft scripts) on or around 19 December 1963, he saw this as impractical. If nothing else, it would have damaged one of Doctor Who’s few but essential pieces of recurring scenery; that might have been conceivable when the series faced cancellation but not once a longer run was confirmed. An interview with Cusick says his work on the serial involved, ‘extending the TARDIS set to include rest-rooms and more of the control room,’ but not whether it was his idea to ignore the script [3].

Alternatively, the instruction to create new rooms in the TARDIS may have come from director Richard Martin. Sadly, he couldn’t recall details when I spoke to him in August 2022 – it was all too long ago – but circumstantial evidence supports this view. As we’ve seen, while in pre-production on The Daleks, Martin sent Whitaker extensive notes on the workings of the TARDIS, showing his interest in developing the concept. The episode of Serial C that he directed, ‘The Edge of Destruction’, is the only one to feature these separate rooms. We can compare that episode’s 118 individual shots in 13 separate scenes before the final credits to ‘The Brink of Disaster’, directed by Frank Cox, which features 91 shots over just four scenes, none of them in the girls’ bedroom or at what the script calls ‘Ian’s bed’, and one of them comprising that last, brief sequence on the snowy mountainside. The contrast is striking, and it would be strange if Whitaker originally structured and framed these two episodes so differently, given that they’re set in the same place. He was writer and editor of both episodes, which all had the same producer, designer, cast and crew; the one changing element was the director. As we’ve seen, Martin told DWM that his main contribution to the episode in how he’d ‘experimented with exciting ways of shooting the set.’[4]

Whether it was Martin or Cusick who prompted the change, the script of ‘The Edge of Destruction’ was apparently rewritten to describe four distinct but connected sets: the main control room, living quarters, girls’ bedroom and Ian’s bed – apparently in a room of its own. In the surviving camera script, these scene headings are included on pages not marked as having been amended on 9 January 1964, suggesting they were already there before that. This in turn suggests three distinct phases of amendments to the original script: the one that divided up the space into separate rooms; the amendments dated 9 January, and modifications made during the rehearsal period, such as Susan stabbing one bed with her scissors.

The curved beds Cusick sourced or made are reminiscent of the ‘stations’ used in real-life space capsules of the time, in which astronauts lay for launch, re-entry and control functions during flight. As a contemporary report explained, ‘the station was a form-fitting bunk moulded, in hard plastic, to [an astronaut’s] body contours’, mounted on a three-way gimbal so that it stayed level while the capsule changed direction[5]. Whitaker seems to have approved of the beds Cusick duly produced, and some months after production concluded on Serial C he included them in the first Doctor Who novelisation: ‘The bed I was on had a soft, foam rubber mattress and was shaped rather like a deckchair, except that it was bent and raised under my knees.’[6]

But then Whitaker was, at least early on, interested in showing daily life aboard the TARDIS. On 24 January 1964, he replied to a letter from a viewer about Barbara’s change of clothes during The Daleks to assure her that an episode would shortly reference the extensive wardrobe on board the TARDIS[7] – indeed, the Doctor’s reference to the TARDIS’ ‘very extensive wardrobe’ was recorded that same day, as part of ‘The Brink of Disaster’. Whitaker went on in his letter that he hoped to explore more of the TARDIS, with Ian due to undergo a haircut and shave conducted by a machine. This never materialised on screen, and Whitaker admitted to Mrs Lee that it was difficult to incorporate such domestic elements into the adventure stories. He wasn’t the only story or script editor of Doctor Who to struggle with this. For example, though the TARDIS wardrobe helpfully explained the regulars’ changes of costume over subsequent serials, it wasn’t mentioned again on screen until 1966 – when it is mentioned in the episodes ‘War of God’ (The Massacre, episode 1), ‘The Steel Sky’ (The Ark, episode 1) and the first episode of The Tenth Planet – and it didn’t appear on screen at all until The Twin Dilemma (1984).

Some sources claim that director Christopher Barry came up with the idea for the TARDIS food machine first seen in The Daleks[8], but his surviving memo of 11 October 1963 tells us only that he thought it a good idea to include this and other details of life lived aboard the TARDIS – as if it already featured in the draft script he’d read[9]. Whatever the case, Whitaker made use of the pre-existing prop in Serial C… then promptly forgot about it, too. The food machine features briefly once more in The Space Museum (1965) – a story Whitaker was involved in commissioning. By the time of The Wheel in Space (1968), written by Whitaker, the Doctor’s companion Jamie is surprised by the literally square meal of roast beef and potatoes served by a machine on a space rocket. That reaction suggests that the food machine on the TARDIS was long out of use, Jamie having travelled with the Doctor since The Highlanders (1966). Whitaker has some fun with Jamie’s astonishment at the food machine, echoing the response of Barbara and Ian in The Daleks, so such a machine was still a fun science fiction idea – it’s where it was located that is telling.

Absurd theory #6: Serial C explores and expands the inside of the TARDIS, yet also marks a key shift in focus in Doctor Who; after this, the ship was largely a means to get to places of interest, rather than of interest itself.

What are the Round Things?

Then there’s what Serial C reveals about the pre-existing sets. As we saw in Part One, the design of the TARDIS interior – and the enormous costs it incurred – almost killed off Doctor Who before the series got on air. The recording of the first episode on 27 September 1963 was beset with problems, not least because the bulky, unwieldy doors of the control room did not close properly[10]. As a result, on what was already a fraught production made with limited time and resources, a second take was needed of the second half of the episode, and then the whole episode was remounted on 18 October.

Why were the walls and doors of the TARDIS made to be so cumbersome? The background notes on Doctor Who produced on 16 May 1963 speak of a ‘vast chromium and glass interior’[11], which would have been easier and cheaper to realise. There’s very little description of the spaceship in any of Coburn’s draft scripts for the first episode, leaving it to the designer. Peter Brachacki was an experienced designer for television and, despite the well-documented problems with the TARDIS set, continued to have a successful career after his brief stint on Doctor Who. He understood the practical needs of recording as live in the studio, with limited budgets and recording time, and limited ‘man hours’ – in the terminology of the time – for putting up and striking the sets. Yet his design drawing of 9 August specifies that the wall should be one foot in thickness, including roundels; the design of the door section, in a drawing of 12 August, is two feet thick in its metal frame allowing for supports and counterweights. These are hefty, space-consuming pieces.

The volume of the design didn’t come up when Brachacki was interviewed in 1976, though he did explain what prompted the roundels in the walls. ‘I wanted something that would be timeless,’ he said, ‘something equally suited to ancient Egypt and the far distant future. It could have been any geometrical shape, for example, hexagons.’[12] Indeed, the arrangement of the roundels forms a hexagonal pattern, matched in the six sides of the console. But none of this explains why the walls had to be so thick; later versions of the TARDIS set produced by other designers feature roundels in much thinner walls.

So let’s go back over what we’ve gleaned so far. In Scene 5 of ‘The Edge of Destruction’, the doors open while the ship is in flight. As we saw in Part Two, the doors of the TARDIS also open in flight at the beginning of Planet of Giants, a serial broadcast later the same year. Yet as early as September 1963, David Whitaker wrote of his anxiety not to repeat elements in stories, so there must have been a special case for doing so here [13]. As I outlined in Part Two, I think this is because both Serial C and Planet of Giants originated from the same source, reworking elements from what had been planned for ‘The Giants’, even if it’s not spelled out in the surviving storyline. In Planet of Giants, the opening of the doors exposes the TARDIS and its crew to ‘space pressure’, which shrinks them down to tiny size. As discussed earlier, my guess is that something like that would also have happened in ‘The Giants’. As in the broadcast first episode of Doctor Who, Barbara and Ian would have pushed their way into the TARDIS, and the Doctor – his secrets exposed – would have set the controls for take off. The difference in ‘The Giants’ would have been that a policeman entering and then fleeing the ship would mean it took off while the doors were still open.

This may have been part of the brief given to the BBC’s design department in early June 1963. Even if not, when Brachacki was assigned to Doctor Who in July, the plan was still to produce ‘The Giants’ as the third – and then fourth – serial. Brachacki was surely briefed on the production team’s plans for the spaceship beyond the initial episode and four-part serial. I don’t think it’s too great a leap to suggest that the ‘space pressure’ in Planet of the Giants originated in ‘The Giants’ and so was part of Brachacki’s design brief. To withstand such pressure, Brachacki designed something akin to a pressurised chamber, a vault with thick, strong walls and door. The translucence of the roundels would also have enabled the production team to convey a visual sense of such space pressure, simply by applying lighting effects from the far side of the set, in the same way that a dappled lighting affect applied to a submarine interior would give the impression of being under the sea. Director Richard Martin’s memo of 22 October 1963 discussing the workings of the TARDIS at one point describes the interior as a ‘compression chamber’[14] – not, I contend, as a new idea but in line with what had already been decided.

Absurd theory #7: The TARDIS has roundels so that we can see the thickness of the walls and door, which were meant to look sturdy enough to withstand the enormous force of space pressure outside during flight.

Handling, the Truth

One way that the TARDIS attempts in Serial C to guide its four passengers to the peril they all face is by reacting to their changing positions in the control room. For example, when Ian strides towards the open doors, they close, but when he turns and walks away they reopen. Susan’s response to this is to try the controls on the central column – and the TARDIS gives her some kind of electric shock. By the end of the serial, we discover that only part of the control column is safe to touch: the bit around the fast-return switch, which is the source of all the problems.

This guiding of the four regulars is surely just an extension of the old children’s game in which a person can be directed to a particular item or place by telling them ‘Hot, hotter’ as they get close and ‘Cold, colder’ as they move off course.

But I want to focus on the control column giving electrical shocks. In ’An Unearthly Child’, the first episode of Doctor Who, Ian receives a shock from the control column because the Doctor has adjusted a control so that the panel becomes – in Susan’s words – ‘live’. But that isn’t quite what happens in Serial C. Susan doesn’t touch the console. She tells the Doctor later in the same episode that she ‘tried to touch it, and it was like being hit but without any pain.’ Ian makes the same point in both episodes of the serial: ‘I wouldn’t go near the control column,’ and ‘I told you not to go near’. Proximity rather than direct contact is what results in a shock.

Except that proximity does equate to direct contact, if we take a wider view of the space in which events occur. The floor of the main control room is visible in many shots in the story, but colour photographs of the sets make something more evident: the floor of the control room is a deep blue colour, except for the shining, silvery hexagon on which the central column stands. The studio floor plan drawn up for the pilot episode by Gillian Howells (working under Brachacki) labels this as an ‘aluminium floor section’, and it extends a good metre out from the base of the control console. Brachacki’s design drawing for the console includes the idea that it should be mounted on castors, with a ‘circular run of track’ underneath allowing ‘the whole control panel to move round’[15] thus enabling the Doctor to reach any lever or switch by turning the console rather than having to dash around it. Brachacki surely intended the aluminium floor section to include this track, but that’s not what it was used for on screen. Indeed, the hexagonal shape of the floor section matches the six sides of the console – implying that the console is fixed in one position and doesn’t rotate. This in turn suggests that the floor section has a different purpose.

On page 22 of the script for ‘The Edge of Destruction’, just before Susan’s warning about how she tried to touch the column and it gave her a shock, stage directions specify that, ‘Doctor Who is standing near the control column, but not standing on the silvered floor around the base of the column.’ Whitaker clearly thought that distinction was important, since he specifies it in the script. The implication is that this aluminium section is more than simply a base for the control column; it’s an integral part of its workings. A person stepping on this silvered section of floor makes direct connection to the TARDIS. This is what results in the electrical shocks in Serial C.

Neither Susan or the Doctor immediately spot this connection between the floor and the shocks, which might be taken to mean that they don’t fully understand the function of this silvered section of floor – or that I’m completely wrong here. But there are good reasons why they wouldn’t immediately deduce what is happening: the shocks happen when they reach for the console, so it is natural to assume the console is ‘live’; the shocks are felt in the head and neck rather than in the feet (the point of contact)[16]; and the Doctor is convinced anyway that, because of the open TARDIS doors, the problem is caused by something from outside the ship. It’s not that they don’t know about the silvered floor, they simply overlook it.

What’s more, the significance of this section of floor illuminates something odd that happens in both the pilot and first broadcast episode of Doctor Who. In both, the Doctor sets the TARDIS in flight. The others try to stop him but to no avail. The TARDIS takes off with Susan and the Doctor standing at the console while Barbara and Ian collapse unconscious. Why?

In both versions, as the others try to stop the Doctor working the controls, he cries out to Susan to ‘Get back to the Ship. Hold it.’ Of course, they’re all already inside the spaceship at the time and he surely means the console – which Susan is directed to hold. He and Susan then both stand in a particular manner as the TARDIS takes flight, each with their backs to one panel of the console, reaching behind them to hold on. On-set photographs make this stance clearer[17]. When the TARDIS takes flight for a second time, at the end of ‘The Firemaker’ (An Unearthly Child episode 4), Barbara sits in the chair to one side of the console (where she collapsed during the previous take-off), while the Doctor, Susan and Ian take positions at the console and hold on. They’re not holding on in the closing scene of ‘The Rescue’ (The Daleks episode 7 (1964)) but by then the TARDIS is already in flight – we don’t see their positions at take-off. We don’t get a third instance of the TARDIS taking off from the perspective of the control room until ‘A Desperate Venture’ (The Sensorites episode 6), when all four characters are again standing at the console, facing inward, and both Barbara and Ian appear to at least have their hands on the console.

Brachacki’s design drawing dated 12 August 1963 says to ‘fit metal handles to each corner [of the six-sided control panel] supplied by designer.’ These have often been interpreted as a practical aid for the scene-shifters[18] who had to put up and strike this set on a regular basis. But I think they’re evidence of something else entirely, akin to the beds introduced in Serial C being clearly based on those used in contemporary spaceflight.

Absurd theory #8: The TARDIS originally had fixed positions for take-off, just as on a real spacecraft.

Heart of the Machine

Was standing so close to the control console really such a good idea? The impression given in ‘The Brink of Disaster’ is that it’s like standing on a powder keg. The Doctor tells us that ‘the heart of the machine’ and ‘the source of power’ are located directly ‘under the column’, and that this is why the column rises and falls during flight. He continues, in what he seems to think are simple terms, that, ‘when the column rises, it proves the extent of the power thrust.’ Susan then tells us that if the column came out completely, ‘the power would be free to escape’, which is not wholly reassuring. In the script but not the broadcast version, the Doctor adds that, ’The column holds the power down too, of course.’

The impression is that the console and silvered section of floor under it act like a cork in a bottle of something fizzy. Or, since we’re told the TARDIS is a thinking machine and perhaps even alive, the analogy might be closer to a lamp containing a genie desperate to escape. But that’s not the allusion David Whitaker used to explain the TARDIS. On 1 May 1964, a few months after Serial C had been broadcast, he replied to a letter from a viewer about the mechanics of time travel in Doctor Who. According to Whitaker, time should be thought of as like a road going up and over a hill. In our ordinary lives, we walk on the road so can’t see where it’s heading, but the Doctor is positioned at the top of the hill and looks out over the whole pattern – where it’s been and where it’s heading. Whitaker’s point was that the Doctor couldn’t affect or change this road[19]. But surely the Doctor gains this enhanced perspective on time because of the vehicle he’s in: in the TV series, that’s the TARDIS; in the analogy it would be a car.

Whitaker had already made this connection. In the first half of July 1963, having just been appointed story editor on Doctor Who, he revised the ‘General notes on Background and Approach’ document originally drafted in May, before sending it out to potential writers. No doubt working with Lambert, he made a number of significant changes, two of which are relevant here.

After a brief overview of the approach to stories, the revised document then has a paragraph on each of the regular characters. (A notable difference from earlier versions of the document is that in Whitaker’s version the Doctor is the first of the four regular characters listed, rather than the last. I said in Part Two that it’s ‘The Brink of Disaster’ that gives the Doctor his first big speech and confirms him as the lead of the series, and I don’t think this background document necessarily contradicts that. We know it was sent out to prospective writers by 12 July[20], which was just as Lambert also approached the agent of William Hartnell to offer him the role[21]. The order of the characters helped them get a star actor for what was still an ensemble cast.)

The paragraph describing the Doctor includes his relationship to the as-yet unnamed ship: the Doctor is like an ordinary car driver – in control so long as the car works properly, and in trouble when it doesn’t, without the technical know-how to fix it. Such an analogy makes the ship relatable, and informs our reading of the Doctor’s words in ‘The Brink of Disaster’. He’s not standing on a powder keg but at the controls of a machine akin to the combustion engine inside a car, where burning fuel produces high-temperature, high-pressure gases that then work mechanical parts. When the Doctor speaks of the central column rising and falling in relation to the extent of thrust, he’s describing something akin to a piston, the kind of chemical-mechanical process we take for granted in everyday life.

Of course, drivers can be sentimental about their cars and even give them names. But Whitaker went further than that. The second key difference in his revised background document is that the section describing the regular characters comprises five paragraphs: one each for Doctor Who, Susan, Barbara, Ian Chesterton… and the Ship[22]. The idea of a living machine seems to have been one Whitaker and his colleagues were keen on. The Daleks, after all, appear to be machines but turn out to contain living creatures. In that same story, the very first alien being seen in Doctor Who is a living machine, a metal and magnetic animal named as a ‘Magnodon’ in The Dalek Book (1964) – written by Whitaker and Nation – where it is just ‘one of the metal creatures of Skaro’[23]. This metal animal so pleased Lambert that she kept the prop on display in her office for at least a year. ‘He’s my favourite,’ she told the Guardian Journal in February 1965, ‘I couldn’t bear to part with him.’[24]

So, the team making Serial C were intrigued by living machines. Daleks are living beings who made themselves more like machines; Serial C flips that idea and explores how a living machine might think and communicate – and, I contend, something more. The Doctor says in ‘The Brink of Disaster’ that the nascent solar system outside the ship can ‘attract the power away from’ the TARDIS. The word ‘attract’ on its own might not be suggestive, but the Doctor is answering Barbara’s earlier question about the power of the TARDIS being held down by the control column and ‘what would make it want to escape.’ Together, the words ‘want’ and ‘attract’ convey the impression of craving, the ship actively interested in, even wooed by, this new solar system.

Subsequent Doctor Who stories have suggested that the TARDIS is capable of feelings and desires[25]. But even without those later examples, the Doctor’s explanation in ‘The Brink of Disaster’ could be clearer and more scientifically credible with the slightest tweak to the wording, such as, ‘It would take the gravitational force of a total solar system to ensnare my ship…’ That would match the well-understood phenomena that bodies of sufficient mass (such as a whole solar system) exert huge gravitational force. But, as already discussed, this serial makes no reference to gravity, or to relativity either, for all it’s about the peculiar side-effects of travel in time and space. Serial C uses simpler, more relatable language, and the effect is to conjure the sense of a much more strange and impulsive something deep inside the spaceship, with strong feelings of its own.

What’s more, the Doctor knows. He doesn’t check his instruments to learn what’s outside the TARDIS that has left it so enthralled. If, as we’ve discussed, the fast-return switch takes the ship back to prior destinations, then surely it’s been here before – another unseen adventure from before the first TV episode. What the Doctor realises, but won’t share with the others and so covers with a speech, is that the TARDIS has been drawn back to an old flame.

Absurd theory #9: In Serial C, the TARDIS is imperilled not by gravity but by desire.

The Key to the TARDIS

The final, brief scene of ‘The Brink of Disaster’ takes place on what the script calls the ‘snowy plateau’. Stage directions instruct the production team to ‘Show police box, snow on ground and scattered snow-covered boulders.’ In the broadcast version, we don’t see the TARDIS exterior. For one thing, it’s not needed on this small, simple set. For another, we don’t need to see it; we know what the TARDIS looks like from outside. Yet things could have been very different.

‘The TARDIS was supposed to change its shape,’ says Verity Lambert on the DVD commentary for the pilot episode of Doctor Who. ‘Of course, we never had the money to do that, so it always retained its police box exterior, which of course I think is a huge advantage in retrospect.’ But I don’t think the police box was retained solely on the grounds of cost.

The interview with designer Peter Brachacki quoted above includes the detail that, ‘he and another designer had gone out and measured a [real] Police Box, and had had the Box built from their plans.’[26] The TARDIS prop was therefore not, as is sometimes claimed, a pre-existing prop,[27] but one that took time and effort to build. If that was included in the costs of building the spaceship – i.e. the interior set – then the police box was part of the overspend Lambert agreed to pay off over the first 13 episodes. But by the time those costs came to light, it had already been decided to retain the police box exterior throughout the first four episodes. On 19 September 1963, pre-filming took place of the police box exterior on the desert landscape for the first serial. This included the sequence at the end of the fourth episode, where the TARDIS dematerialises while spears are thrown at (and through) it.

Had the production team wanted the TARDIS to change shape in this first story, a prop boulder would have been relatively cheap to produce – quite a few large rocks and rock-forms are visible on the Ealing set seen in the serial. But even if the audience saw such a boulder materialise, would they make the connection that this was the same ship? We’d need dialogue in the first episode to explain that the TARDIS can change shape, when that episode must already convey a lot of establishing information. It would also help to see the transformation from police box to boulder. But that would all have made things more complicated.

Besides, the police box standing slightly askew on a desert landscape is a striking visual image, the menacing shadow that then falls over it a very effective cliffhanger – all relayed without words. The incongruity creates compelling drama. Since the overspend was not yet an issue, I think the decision was made to retain the police box for storytelling reasons, rather than budget.

But on 25 October, studio recording of the second episode of the serial included lines of dialogue about the TARDIS normally changing shape automatically to blend in with its surroundings; the Doctor and Susan are surprised that it hasn’t done so. Perhaps this dialogue is simply there to explain why the TARDIS resembles a police box at all (as it blended into the surroundings of London, 1963), but the fact it’s described as an automatic process is striking. If the production team had decided by this point to retain the police box exterior indefinitely, the explanation might have suggested something less easy: for example, that the Doctor can change the exterior shape, but it involves a complex, time-consuming procedure. I think the dialogue as given leaves open the possibility that the mechanism would one day be fixed.

That couldn’t occur at the end of the first serial because the production team had already shot the police box departing from the desert. There’s no obvious place in The Daleks where the mechanism might have been fixed. Besides, the production team were keen to keep costs down on this serial, and they could use the pre-existing police box at no additional expense. If the police box was part of the overspend on realising the TARDIS more generally, that debt was cleared in the closing moments of Serial C. And Serial C concludes with the Doctor fixing another part of the TARDIS – the spring in the fast-return switch – then repairing his relationship with Barbara and the others. It’s the obvious place to have corrected the fault with the as-yet unnamed system for changing the exterior shape, had the production team so wanted. But they didn’t want that; these closing moments are therefore the point at which they made the conscious choice to keep the police box as a recognisable icon of Doctor Who.

This wasn’t the only original conception of the TARDIS and its workings to be done away with in this early period of the series. I’ve already raised the idea of the crew having launch positions at the console. Then there’s the TARDIS key.

Stage directions in the camera script for the first episode of Doctor Who describe a complex, intricate process for opening the door of the ship. The Doctor, we’re told, inserts an ordinary-looking key but turns it and ‘the whole lock comes away from the door.’ He then ‘shines a small torch like object into [the] opening’ and ‘the door starts to open with a high electronic whine.’ It’s sophisticated technology using a two-stage process.[28]

This protruding lock is clearly visible in the pilot episode, though in the broadcast version we cut away just as the Doctor gets his ordinary-looking key up to the lock. As a result, it’s sometimes claimed that the protruding lock is one of the things changed between the pilot and remounted versions of the first episode[29]. Yet in the second episode of The Daleks, as broadcast, Susan confirms that, ‘The whole lock comes away from the door.’ In fact, this is an important plot point in the story: the fact that ‘there are twenty-one different holes inside the lock,’ and, ‘if you make a mistake […] the whole inside of the lock will melt,’ is why Susan, not Barbara or Ian, must make the perilous journey back to the ship. The idea is still there in the opening episode of The Sensorites, when the titular aliens remove the lock – Susan calls it the ‘opening mechanism’ – meaning that the Doctor and his friends cannot get into the ship.

These two serials rather exhaust the dramatic possibilities of a protruding, removable lock: that only particular members of the cast can work it; that it can be lost. But I don’t think that was the point of this lock. Until the production team decided, around the time they made Serial C, to keep the police box prop as a signature element of Doctor Who, the lock had a different purpose.

Absurd theory #10: If the TARDIS changed shape to blend in with its surroundings, the protruding lock would have been the constant, recognisable feature in its various guises.

[1] Christopher Barry, ‘Special effects in connexion with Dr Who 2nd story’, 30 September 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[2] For more, see Smith, Paul MC, The TARDIS Chronicles (2020); Rymill, Gavin, ‘Design Changes of the TARDIS Set - Pt 1: Season One & Two’; Newman, ‘An Unearthly Studio’, Nothing at the End of the Lane #4 (Autumn 2015).

[3] Vincent-Rudzki and Payne, ‘The Raymond Cusick Interview: Part Two’, TARDIS vol 2, no 4 (1977), p7.

[4] Griffiths, ‘The Dalek Factor’, DWM #232, p48.

[5] Pursglove, ‘Our First Moon Trip Started at 4.30 the morning of July 1, 1969’, Popular Mechanics vol 117, no. 3 (March 1962), p110.

[6] Whitaker, David, Doctor Who and the Daleks, p23.

[7] Whitaker, David, to Mrs C Lee, WAC T5/649 Viewers Letters [1964].

[8] For example: ’The scene with the food machine in the first episode was suggested by Chris Barry, who wanted to show how the travellers would live aboard the Doctor’s ship.’ (Doctor Who: The Complete History vol 1, p127.)

[9] Christopher Barry, ‘Dr Who – Second Serial’, 11 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[10] This is evident in the pilot episode included on the DVD set Doctor Who: The Beginning (2007).

[11] Wilson, Webber and Newman, ‘Dr. Who General Notes on Background and Approach for an Exciting Adventure – Science Fiction Drama Series for Childrens Saturday Viewing’, 16 May 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[12] Vincent-Rudzki and Payne, ‘Interview: The TARDIS Designer Peter Brachacki’, TARDIS vol 1 no 10 (September 1976), pp23-24.

[13] Whitaker to Malcolm Hulke, 13 September 1963, WAC T48/333/1 Drama Writers File – Malcolm Hulke (Deceased).

[14] Martin to Lambert et al, ‘Dr Who - Serial B’, 22 October 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[15] deck5, ‘Original 1963 Peter Brachacki TARDIS Set Drawings’.

[16] ‘I was hit on the back of the neck,’ says the Doctor in ‘The Edge of Destruction’, and later in the same episode Barbara tends to Susan by applying a towel to her forehead, as if this is the focus of her pain.

[17] See, for example, Doctor Who: The Complete History Story vol 1, p76.

[18] For example, in the production subtitles on ‘The Brink of Disaster’, on the DVD release: ‘handles on the sides would have been jolly useful!’

[19] Whitaker, David, to Mr R Adams, 1 May 1964, WAC T5/649 Viewers Letters [1964].

[20] Whitaker, David, ‘Story Editor’s report’, 12 July 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[21] Hartnell first heard of the role on 11 July, and met Verity Lambert and Waris Hussein the following day to discuss it (Doctor Who: The Complete History vol 1, p55).

[22] Anon [but surely Whitaker], ‘General notes on Background and Approach for an exciting Adventure – Science Fiction Drama serial for Childrens Saturday Viewing”, undated redraft c. 12 July 1963, WAC T5/648/1 General B.

[23] Whitaker, David, and Nation, Terry, ‘The Dalek Dictionary’, The Dalek Book, p87.

[24] Smith, Elsie M, ‘Verity Keeps Dr Who true to Life’, Guardian Journal, 3 February 1965, p4.

[25] For example: ‘I wanted to see the universe so I stole a Time Lord and I ran away,’ says Idris (i.e. the TARDIS) in The Doctor’s Wife (2011).

[26] Vincent-Rudzki and Payne, ‘Interview: The TARDIS designer Peter Brachacki’.

[27] For example, executive producer Steven Moffat said in March 2010 that ‘A lot of the most iconic things about Doctor Who are a direct consequence of financial shortcomings,’ and used the original production team as an example. ‘They said, "We’ve got a police box from Dixon of Dock Green – let’s make a box that’s bigger on the inside," and thus was born the single best idea in all of fiction.’ (Masters, Tim, ‘Doctor Who Boss Not Worried by Budget Squeeze’.)

[28] In ‘Volcano’ (1966), the Monk uses ‘some kind of ray’ to reset the lock mechanism of the TARDIS, and the Doctor counteracts this by using his ring to angle light from the sun of Tigus into the lock. The plot came ‘from an idea by Terry Nation’ according to the onscreen credit, the author perhaps recalling the original story purpose of the lock.

[29] For example: ‘[In the pilot episode] the Doctor opens the TARDIS door by first inserting the key, and then pulling out the entire lock mechanism. Music can be heard playing inside the ship. In the second version the Doctor simply turns the key and there is no music.’ (Preddle, Jon, ‘An Unearthly Pilot Episode’, 1993).

CONCLUSIONS

‘You don’t know, do you? You’re just guessing, aren’t you?’

[Barbara, ‘The Brink of Disaster’]

I’ve attempted to explain and contextualise this strange two-part adventure, but perhaps the strangest thing about it is the result of something that happened years after it was broadcast. The BBC wiped the original recordings of this and many other Doctor Who episodes, and junked many film recordings. Luckily, and thanks to the diligent efforts of some brilliant people, we can watch the first 13 episodes of Doctor Who, including this adventure. But then there is a void.

The seven episodes of Marco Polo are missing from the archive. We can listen to the soundtrack, scrutinise off-air photographs, pick over scripts and other sources, and there’s a very good book on the serial in the Black Archive series by someone who did see it – twice[1]. But watching the series in order from the start, the end of ‘The Brink of Disaster’ is like standing on the edge of a precipice. When we catch up with our heroes again in the surviving The Keys of Marinus, the programme is very different. These are episodes made after, and written in response to, the huge impact of the Daleks on screen. It’s now a series with a new sense of purpose – increasingly about bug-eyed monsters (and robots).

Even if Marco Polo still existed, Serial C would mark a notable shift. These two episodes are the last (of four) in the whole history of Doctor Who with credited roles for just the regular cast[2]. After this, the mysteries of the Doctor and the TARDIS are not enough in themselves to sustain interest. For all that the relationships between Doctor, companions and ship can still provide some drama, we look outside the spaceship for the basis of each new adventure. Serial C consolidates the relationships between the regular characters, and marks the consolidation of Doctor Who.

Part of that, I think, is its confidence in embracing the odd. As we’ve seen, the intention behind Serial C was to explore the TARDIS, yet instead of revealing exactly how it works, it throws up ever more questions. At the end of the adventure, we know the TARDIS isn’t just a machine, but we’re not certain quite what’s involved – we know less about it than we did at the start. And that’s brilliant! How boring, how fatal to the series as a whole, if we’d had straightforward answers, especially so early on in the series.

As we’ve seen, Serial C was devised, at least in part, to ensure that Doctor Who survived – initially beyond just four episodes, then beyond just thirteen. But I think its strangeness might be a foundation for more lasting success. Just as with the Dalek serial that preceded it, it sets a precedent for what’s to come. It’s the first of many stories where regular characters are possessed and act out of character, to disturbing (and cheap-to-realise) effect. It’s the first of many stories where we know the stakes are high because the lighting is low in the TARDIS. And, most importantly, it’s the first story where the TARDIS has agency.

The crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek have an attachment to their ship but there’s no sense that it’s anything other than a well-run machine, akin to a naval vessel in space. The spaceships in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Red Dwarf (1988-) have onboard computers with programmed personalities that aim to emulate humans, but their shortcomings reflect – and are because of – our own failings. The TARDIS is something altogether stranger, other, more tantalising. That is its lasting appeal. And I think that’s largely down to the precedent set by this odd little adventure, from a vital, formative moment.

The oddness is its virtue.

[1] October, Dene, The Black Archive #18: Marco Polo (2020).

[2] ‘An Unearthly Child’ features a policeman and some schoolchildren, all uncredited; ‘The Dead Planet’ features the bare hand of assistant floor manager Michael Ferguson and the sink-plunger of a Dalek.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was inspired by two things. First, on 30 May 2022, Toby Hadoke asked if I could provide any details about the production of this particular serial. Toby’s excellent podcast Too Much Information covers the making of each episode of Doctor Who in great depth, but with the BBC archives not holding a production file for this serial, Toby was struggling a bit. I duly went through the notes for my forthcoming biography of writer David Whitaker, and pulled out anything relevant – though most of it was of indirect interest, providing context rather than detail.

The following month, I took part in ‘Science Fiction and the Future of Detection and Imaging’ at CERN Ideas Square in Geneva, organised by Markus Nordberg and Dr Una McCormack (Una wrote The Black Archive book on The Curse of Fenric). One subject of discussion was the way scientists try to detect and image things that can’t be seen directly, from tiny subatomic particles to enormous black holes. I wrote in my notes that once you’re aware of the (possible) existence of something you can’t see directly, you can map out its discernible boundaries – the fuzzy edges – then start to deduce the properties of whatever sits within. I discussed with both Una and Professor Kim Wilkins from the University of Queensland how this might be applied to my work in Doctor Who archaeology… This book is the result of the collision of these various small particles of thought.

As well as my gratitude to everyone mentioned above, I’d like to thank my fellow Doctor Who archaeologists for their support, generosity and patience, including Jeremy Bentham, Richard Bignell, David Brunt, Graeme Burk, Chris Chapman, Steve Cole, Benjamin Cook, Hannah Cooper, James Cooray Smith, Robbie Dunlop, Toby Hadoke, Marcus Hearn, Michael Herbert, Gary Hopkins, David Howe, Graham Kibble-White, Andrew Ledger, Richard Marson, Alex Moore, Liz Myles, Phil Newman, Stephen Payne, Andrew Pixley, Jon Preddle, Jan Vincent Rudzki, Garry Russell, Gav Rymill, Paul Smith, Dr Matthew Sweet, Oliver Wake, Steven James Walker, Dr Martin Wiggins, Rhys Williams, and everyone at Doctor Who Magazine, the Complete History and those who work so diligently on the DVDs and Blu-rays. Special mention to the late Ian K McLachlan, much missed as a sounding board; I think my theory about roundels would have made him laugh.

Thanks also to Katie Ankers and everyone at the BBC Written Archive Centre – especially for permission to quote from archive sources. I’m very grateful to Richard Martin and Stef Coburn for sharing their memories with me, and to Dr Jessie Christiansen from the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech.

John Sailing at the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain found me the article by David Whitaker from the Screenwriter Quarterly.

My thanks to beta readers Dr Debbie Challis, Alasdair Mackenzie and Eddie Robson, and to editor Stuart Douglas who indulged these absurd ideas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Wade, Robin, ’Where the Difference Began – Some Developments in Scripts and Script Sections in BBC Television, 1936-74’. Internal BBC document, 1975. BFI Conservation Centre shelf mark 654.197-82.

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deck5, ‘Original 1963 Peter Brachacki TARDIS Set Drawings’. TARDISbuilders.com, 7 January 2016. https://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=6536.0. Accessed 4 February 2023.

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BIOGRAPHY

Simon Guerrier is a writer and sometime producer. His books include David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television (a biography of the first story editor of Doctor Who), a range of fiction and non-fiction titles for BBC Books as well as the Sherlock Holmes novel The Great War (2021). He’s produced Doctor Who audiobooks for Big Finish and documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. Simon previously wrote the Black Archive volume on the 1967 story The Evil of the Daleks.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Title Page

CONTENTS

OVERVIEW

SYNOPSIS

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE – ON THE EDGE

PART TWO – BEYOND THE BRINK

PART THREE – INSIDE THE SPACESHIP

CONCLUSIONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIOGRAPHY