AN ADVENTURE IN SPACE AND TIME

I imagine that most of the country were tuned in to "I'm a Non-Entity" (or whatever it is called) at nine o'clock last Thursday evening, and if they were, well, (at least as far as this admittedly old fannish obsessive was concerned) they missed a bit of a dramatic treat by not switching over to BBC2.

I would be the first to admit that a telly drama that was about telly (and creaky old S-F telly at that), wouldn't necessarily be everyone's cup of tea (I've had enough years of my own little enjoyments playing second fiddle to the more mainstream and popular Goliaths to know that), but this drama, "An Adventure in Space and Time" with a script by Mark Gatiss which appears to have been written as a "love letter" to the origins of a long-running drama that he (and a few others) grew up to absolutely adore, was, quite simply, a far more perfect gift to the fans of "Doctor Who" that we could really have hoped for amongst the blitzkrieg of other celebratory programmes which are being broadcast around the time of this 50th anniversary.

The 3-D episode of the series proper, scheduled for the actual Saturday of the anniversary itself, might be the more "high profile" of the programmes available, but all of that shouting and exposition and running about is going to have to go a very long way to outdo the charm and emotion on display in this dramatic insight into the slightly tragic later life of the original (you might say), a certain character actor by the name of Mr William Hartnell as portrayed by the sublime Mr David Bradley.

Given that Mr Hartnell's career had not turned out quite as he had hoped, "Doctor Who" came along just at the right time to offer him a kind of redemption of sorts, although the twin cruelties of both the industry and his own failing health managed to conspire to make it a simultaneously very special and yet very difficult period of his life, albeit one for which he will always be remembered, and the moment when he breaks down at his own fireplace will resonate anyone who remembers David Tennant's last few moments as the Doctor during his original run, and possibly never let them see that scene in quite the same way again.

Of course, even to people my age, Mr Hartnell was always a bit of a "half-forgotten" figure too in that we knew that he played the first Doctor but, in those pre-home video days, the performance was so unfamiliar to most of us that he was the one Doctor who could be portrayed by another actor during the twentieth anniversary programme without there being all that many eyelids batted, which now, of course, seems rather unbelievable, especially as this film managed to get across more about the man himself in ninety minutes than forty-odd years of articles in books and magazines have really been able to.

But this was also the story of television itself, in those bright, early and hopeful days at the newly opened Television Centre, when sexism and racism were rife amongst the buffers of the old guard, and bright young things like Verity Lambert and Waris Hussain came along and blew the wind of change through those endlessly curving corridors.

I'm not going to rattle through or spoil the plot for you here, but basically, against all the odds, a piece of television magic managed to get made, and its leading man became someone who was not quite as irreplaceable as he believed he was, and somehow this story managed to move me in ways that completely surprised me, and I will admit to having a moistness around the eyeballs a couple of times during the broadcast, not least when, on the brink of being cancelled, those viewing figures of ten million came along and saved the day.

And I will admit that, for this old nostalgia junkie, seeing oh-so-familiar those old sets and scenes so lovingly recreated, as well as spotting one or two very familiar faces around the periphery, felt very special indeed and I can only take my hat off to the care and attention to detail that was put into the entire production.

As far as I'm concerned, if it came down to a straight choice, you could keep your Saturday nonsense… because "An Adventure in Space and Time", (a title, incidentally, based upon the subtitle to its Radio Times listing during the early years of the programme), was simply beautiful…

But, of course, in these days when the programme has so much popularity, we are lucky enough to actually have both.

Such riches indeed…!

And from such humble beginnings, too...