Doctor Who

Who Watched Who?An Unearthly Child

Doctor Who Varos (1985) features the sixth Doctor (Colin Baker, no relation to Tom), and its satiric depiction of the television experience draws on the show’s reflexive treatment of its medium. Finally, The Curse of Fenric (1989), one of the last stories, featuring the seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy), is a good example of the complex sense of time that was built into the series from the beginning but which became even more intricate as it developed over its long run. Who Watched Who? An Unearthly Child The violent events in Dallas must have unsettled many viewers of the first episode of Doctor Who, and the BBC repeated it a week later before the second episode for the benefit of those who had been too distracted to tune in or pay attention . This dramatic conjunction may have amplified the effect of the show on its first viewers, reinforcing the impression of a world out of control created by the Cuban missile crisis a year earlier, when the two superpowers seemed close to nuclear war, as well as by the growing awareness that Britain could no longer have much influence on the outcome. Whatever the reason, the audience of 4.5 million for the first episode increased to 6.5 million when it was repeated, and the last three episodes of the first story drew between 6 and 7 million viewers, very respectable figures for this time slot, and the audience grew to over 10 million by the end of the second story. The first episode was called “An Unearthly Child,” a title that refers to Susan, a fifteen-year-old pupil at a present-day London school. Susan possesses an advanced knowledge of history and science but seems strangely ignorant of familiar aspects of everyday life. Two of her teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, decide to investigate her background and find that the address she has given is a junkyard. They follow her inside and meet an old man, who turns out to be 7 Jim Leach Susan’s grandfather and who calls himself the Doctor. When they force their way into a police telephone box in which they think he is holding her prisoner, they are astonished to discover that it is much bigger on the inside than it appears from the outside. Susan calls it the TARDIS, an acronym of Time and Relative Dimension in Space, and explains that it can travel anywhere in space and time, but they refuse to believe her. The Doctor is outraged at the intrusion and activates the controls, generating the series’ first cliffhanger when the episode ends with the police box materializing in a barren landscape, with the shadow of a silent onlooker looming threateningly toward it. The first episode thus takes the teachers (and the viewers ) from a modern school to a junkyard filled with objects from the past to the futuristic space inside the TARDIS and finally to an as yet undefined space that seems remote from all 8 Bigger on the inside: Ian and Barbara confront the Doctor after entering the police telephone box in the junkyard. Doctor Who these others. As the next three episodes reveal, the Doctor and his companions have traveled back to the distant past, where they encounter a tribe of cavemen who have lost the secret of making fire. According to usual practice for most of the first three seasons, each episode had its own title and there was no on-screen title for the story as a whole, but the later video release packaged all of the episodes in a particular story together under the title of the first. Even though “An Unearthly Child” did not really apply to the prehistoric story, it reinforced the opening gambit of framing the series in relation to contemporary debates surrounding the emergent youth culture. The title was perhaps inspired by the recently released low-budget British science fiction film Unearthly Stranger (dir. John Krish, 1963), in which women are aliens despite their human appearance. But the idea of the unearthly child owes more to another British movie, Village of the 9 The TARDIS arrives in a barren landscape at the end of the first episode and remains in the shape of a London police telephone box. Jim Leach Damned (dir. Wolf Rilla, 1960), based on John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos, in which the children in a quiet country village are the...