A BIT BILLY

Popping through the old letterbox recently (well, fairly recently - actually it was quite a while ago now to be perfectly honest with you, but, hey, what are you going to do other than wait for a suitable date to mention it to come along...?), despite the best efforts of the Post Office to re-divert it to God alone knows where, was yet another shiny disc to add to the collection, although this one was a little bit special…

Well, it was to me at any rate.

Perhaps if you’d been forced to endure it you might have had a different point of view. After all, my inner self is still bruised from the time I lent those videotapes of the very first Dalek adventure to someone at work who eventually returned them to me, dismissing them as a “load of old rubbish” despite having begged to borrow them in the first place to take the opportunity of seeing a “television classic” for the first time.

It’s a good job I didn’t lend him the original BBC version of “Quatermass and the Pit” or we might have ended up indulging in fisticuffs if he’d dared to take a pot shot at that...! And then he’d’ve been sorry,  because he’d probably have hurt me.

Still, those videos were perhaps his first chance at seeing dear old Billy Hartnell in action as “Doctor Who” because, back in those limited channel days, there weren’t that many opportunities to be perfectly honest. Despite having been a “fan” myself since about 1974, even then there hadn’t been a “proper” episode of William Hartnell as Doctor Who on British television since 1966, and apart from clips in shows like “Blue Peter” or “Arena”, the first time I ever saw a complete episode featuring him was in a repeat season shown on BBC2 in 1981, and yet, right from the start, there was something “magical” and “mercurial” about his performance that blew me away and completely buried the myth of his Doctor Who being basically little more than a “crotchety old man” in a Police Box.

Since then, of course, I’ve come to appreciate his performance more and more, especially in those first couple of series when the show was made on a wing and a prayer and a budget that probably wouldn’t have covered the catering bill on a James Bond movie. During that first eighteen months, when the time travellers were Jacqueline Hill as Barbara, William Russell as Ian, Carol Ann Ford as Susan playing alongside Mr Hartnell, that unfolding “Adventure in Time and Space” where you really never knew where the ship was going to turn up next, or how many episodes that you were going to stay in one place for, is an object lesson in telling an ongoing storyline or narrative drama in a non-soap-opera format.

Interestingly, since I have discovered the Audiobook versions of those early stories in recent years, that sense of an ongoing narrative has been rather enhanced by having Mr William Russell read all of the ones that have so far been made available, giving the stories and overall unity of style that makes it read like one long, unfolding tale in, if not quite the “epic” style of something like “Lord of the Rings”, then certainly in the tradition of the Dickensian narratives originally available in “bite-size” monthly parts.

Which brings us to that shiny disc popping through my letterbox, the three episodes making up the story known collectively as “Planet of Giants” which is significant in many ways as it was the story that opened up the second series of “Doctor Who” way back in 1964 but it is also the very last complete story featuring Mr Hartnell that is able to be made available for sale as all of his other complete serials are already available and only ones with “missing” (i.e. Junked, wiped or thrown away) episodes remain on the shelf.

The story involves the TARDIS crew being miniaturised which was one of the ideas batted around right from the earliest days of the creation of the show, and was cut down from four to three episodes to improve the pacing of a story that didn’t really stretch out to its full four-part length. It’s also the very last story to feature the original cast before the changes that the following story would bring about, which would lead to the departure of the Doctor’s “granddaughter” from the series, and some might suggest that, with that rather significant change to the cast and the fundamentals of the series, the show would never be quite the same again.

Which brings us back to William Hartnell. The original and, for many, by far the best of the Doctor Whos. When I sat down and watched that very first episode all those years ago, I was surprised of how much his performance reminded me of that of the mighty Tom, Tom Baker. Of course, I now realise that I should have been thinking about how much Tom Baker’s performance reminded me of William Hartnell, but I was young, and foolish, and hadn’t at that stage got to a point in life where I could acquire all of those episodes for myself.

My understanding of that era, and, to a lesser extent, the one performed by his successor in the role, Patrick Troughton mostly came from the books and magazines which I had read, and this was what allowed the “crotchety old man” myth to persist.

But William Hartnell is a revelation and is totally magical and believable in the part. Yes there are the occasional lapses and the occasional misreading of his lines in what are now known to the few that care about such things as “Billyfluffs” but the more I watch and listen to those performances, the more I start to believe that many of them might very well have been intentional anyway, and a deliberate attempt to add to the “absent minded” aspect of the character.

Within three long years of his first episode, he was gone, with 29 complete stories and 134 episodes under his belt, and within another decade he was dead, presumably of the Arteriosclerosis which had hampered his later performances in the role and, it is said, made him unpopular enough to be quietly “retired” in 1966, having made one final and fairly brief appearance alongside the two actors who followed him in a tenth anniversary serial in 1973.

Anyway, it was 49 years ago today that, as far as television viewers were concerned at any rate, that he first emerged from the fog wearing an Astrakhan hat and cloak and opened the doors to that magical police box to begin that “Adventure in Time and Space...”

Here’s to you, Mr Hartnell, wherever you might now be, with grateful thanks for all the memories...!