ASTRAKHAN HATS AND EVERLASTING MATCHES

47 years ago today, on flickering black and white television screens across Britain, in a brand new adventure series, two schoolteachers named Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright (played by William Russell and Jacqueline Hill) went into a junkyard at number 76 Totter’s Lane and at the same time entered into television history.

“An Unearthly Child” was the first rather magical episode of something of a television phenomenon called “Doctor Who”, and that opening is still an amazing episode to watch even after all these years. Written by Anthony Coburn and Directed by Waris Hussein, it remains a masterclass in producing a template for getting across a high concept in a perfectly ordinary way.

Immediately as the programme begins, you are drawn into a strange and mysterious world as the unusual electronic swirls of the opening titles mingle with the otherworldly noises of Ron Grainer’s composition of the theme so excellently realised by the craftwork of Delia Derbyshire from the (now sadly defunct) Radiophonic Workshop. This theme then continues on after the episode opens with a policeman walking through the torchlit fog of a London evening. He stops to check the gates of a junkyard owned by one I.M. Foreman. As he vanishes into the night, the camera takes us through those gates into the tangled mass of scrap and junk beyond before alighting upon the incongruous shape of a Police Telephone Box which, as we move closer and the music fades, seems to be emitting a strange electronic humming sound.

Nowadays of course, you would instantly think “well that’s a time machine” but back then, on that dark November evening, such obvious conclusions were yet to be made. The viewer does not yet know that this familiar object is about to become a gateway to adventures beyond their wildest imaginings. The mysterious humming noise could have been anything; back then viewers might even have thought it was a mistake of sound on vision. These things do happen even in the modern era.

We then fade away to a corridor in an ordinary English school where exotic teenagers whisper secrets to one another in the corridors. Two schoolteachers meet up to discuss one of their pupils, a strange girl named Susan Foreman, who it seems, has been causing problems. Not the kinds of problems we associate with modern teenagers of course, but worrying enough to these fated teachers for them to take an interest. What we, as viewers, do not know yet is that these ordinary people, teachers of history and science, are going to become our guides and our proxies to exploring the impossible.

When we meet Susan, the eponymous “Unearthly Child”, she is dancing to a tiny transistor radio, listening to a piece of music by “John Smith and the Common Men” (the first ever use of that name in the series, and a name to ponder on…) and seems very ordinary, and Mr Chesterton shows his “hip” credentials by knowing more than most adults might be expected to about the then current music scene when he identifies the real identity of the musician as the Honorable Aubrey Waites. The teachers offer to give Susan a lift home, to satisfy their curiosity more than anything else, but the offer is rejected, as the prospect of walking home in the “mysterious” dark and fog tempts the girl far more.

The teachers decide to follow her and discuss the perceived strangeness of the girl as they sit in the car outside those fateful junkyard gates. Her fragmented knowledge of history and science, at times bordering on both the ingenious and the ignorant has intrigued them enough to wait for her at the unlikely address she claims to live at. After she appears out of the fog and heads inside the yard, they follow her, not without a certain amount of trepidation, but cannot find her amongst all the junk. What they do find is the Police Box, which appears to them to be alive in some way. Then a stranger enters the junkyard and they quickly hide in the shadows. This stranger is, of course, although we don’t yet know it, the mysterious “Doctor Who” of the title.

It’s significant that the Doctor himself doesn’t even appear until this point, about half way through the episode, and now that he does, it seems unlikely that he will ever become the teatime hero known to so many nowadays. He is an elderly gentleman wearing an astrakhan hat, from which are escaping tresses of long silver hair. Sadly, however, the everlasting matches of the storybook adaptations do not appear here. William Hartnell immediately gives the Doctor infectious quality of mystery and magic. There are instances, tiny moments, nothing more, when you watch him that you get glimpses of his successor Tom Baker in his mannerisms and you do wonder whether that later actor had been exposed to his illustrious predecessor’s performance.

When the schoolteachers accidentally reveal their presence, the Doctor potters about, pretending to be initially more fascinated by the junkyard bric-a-brac about him and so obviously irritated at the intrusion of what he sees as these primitive interlopers that he seems almost arrogant to the point of being annoying, but at the same time, also very intelligent and capable of great charm. He almost succeeds in persuading the teachers to go away, but then fate intervenes. Moments later, Susan calls out to her Grandfather, and Ian and Barbara are drawn through the doors of that magical machine that is of such impossibly massive dimensions within, which we are yet to refer to as TARDIS. A few minutes later they are torn away from their ordinary lives when the Doctor decides that their discovery is too dangerous to just let them go, and sets the “ridiculous” time machine (as both Barbara and Ian have suggested) in flight. The episode concludes with the Police Box incongruously deposited on an unusually barren plain, where the viewer sees the mysterious shadow being cast by an unknown “something” which has witnessed their arrival.

At the time of broadcast, of course, no-one making these shows knew that they would still be subjected to such scrutiny and interest nearly half a century on. At that stage, no-one was probably even certain that it would continue beyond it’s initial planned 13 episodes, but endure it did, and 47 years later, despite a few hiccups along the way, a little family TV show designed to keep viewers from changing channels after the football results has become a little bit of an institution that is still going strong today.

So at 5.15 this evening, just for a moment, I shall pause from the activities of my day and remember a little piece of magic being born.