An Adventure in Space and Time

Chapter the 283rd, which may be cheating, but doesn't care - it's anniversary time!

Plot:
The Matt Smith Doctor is minding his business in the TARDIS control room, when he suddenly finds himself projected into an alternate universe where Doctor Who is a TV series performed and made by people who look slightly different to the same people in our real life universe. One of these is Sydney Newman, a brash Canadian recently arrived and wanting to shake things up. He puts together a team to create a new science fiction programme for Saturday evenings. Two key members of that team are outsiders: a 20-something woman producer with loads of talent trying to make it in the man's world of 1960s TV, and a gay British-Indian director with loads of talent trying to make his mark and facing everyday racism. They are Verity Lambert and Waris Hussein, and with help from others and a lot of determination they get the show on air. One of the big decisions is the casting of the Doctor. William Hartnell is looking for something a bit different to the military roles he always seems to get; he isn't sure about committing to a TV run, but Verity and Waris persuade him. After a shaky start, the second story featuring the Daleks captures the public imagination. The series goes from strength to strength, but this success means that people that Hartnell likes working with move on to other things, including Verity and Waris. When there's nobody left of the original team both in front of and behind the camera, Hartnell has become ill and more difficult to work with. Newman informs him that they are recasting the Doctor, and he films the handover to Patrick Troughton. The appearance of the extra-dimensional Matt Smith reassures him that he has secured the legacy of the series, which will run and run.

(Obviously I realise it's just a drama based on real events with a sentimental cameo from the then current Doctor at the end, but how else does one rationalise Smith's appearance within the world of the story as presented - he's either a time traveller or an apparition appearing to a Hartnell who somehow can see into the future; the former seems more appropriate an explanation for a Doctor Who related piece.) 

Context:

To mark the month of the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who first being on TV, November 2023, I am overriding random selection for a few posts to watch some stories in keeping with this celebratory time. After last time having watched the monumental moment when the Doctor first regenerated (allowing the main actor to pass on the role to another), this time I thought it would be worth watching the docu-drama that depicted the backstory behind what played out on the TV screen in 1966, even though it's not an episode of Doctor Who per se. I watched it with the Better Half (more enthusiastic to watch this than any story of Who proper) and the younger two of our three children (boy of 14, girl of 11). It was a Sunday in early November 2023, a week on from the viewing of The Tenth Planet. As that story had coincidentally been watched on the 57th anniversary of the original broadcast of the regeneration in Tenth Planet's final episode, the date of watching An Adventure in Space and Time was - again coincidentally - the 57th anniversary of the first broadcast of Patrick Troughton's debut episode as the Doctor.

Milestone watch: Although this isn't officially a Doctor Who story, it is the last of the specials from 2013 celebrating the 50th anniversary of the programme to be covered for the blog. The others The Day of the Doctor and The Time of the Doctor were covered previously.

First Time Round:

I watched this with the Better Half a day or two after its broadcast for the first time in the UK on BBC2, Thursday 21st November 2013. I couldn't watch it go out live as I was working in Paris for the day job in the week leading up to the anniversary (as briefly mentioned in the First Time Round section of the Day of the Doctor post, linked to above). That Thursday evening (pretension alert!) I was out somewhere buying a bottle of that year's vintage on Beaujolais Nouveau day, to take home with me when I travelled back on Friday the 22nd. I can't remember whether I persuaded the BH to watch the story that evening or the following morning, but I do remember it was before Day of the Doctor was broadcast on the evening of the Saturday. I remember enjoying it very much, but can't recall much else from that first watch.

Reaction:

It's on record that the writer of An Adventure in Space and Time, long-term Doctor Who fan Mark Gatiss, pitched the idea of An Adventure in Space and Time to the BBC a decade earlier in 2003 for the series' 40th anniversary. Ten years later, the time was finally right. By then, Gatiss was a seasoned pro having written many episodes of the new series and other dramas. I don't know whether it was a decade's more writing experience, or a decade's more thinking of how to tell this tale, or whether indeed he had it all worked out from the very beginning, but he managed to find a story structure that fixes a fundamental instability inherent in the real life material: he makes one coherent television film from two separate and in some ways opposite stories. The story of the successful creation of Doctor Who by a group of people - a couple of whom were early in their careers and trying to make their mark - is an interesting one, but it's not perhaps one that would sustain a taut 90-minute TV drama. There's characterful moments and challenges overcome but not enough to equate to major highs or lows. It is merely an Act One for Verity or Waris. The person, though, for whom it represented highs and lows, maybe even life or death, was William Hartnell. But he's not part of the story at its beginning, and doesn't appear for a long stretch of the running time. Gatiss squares this circle by starting with a flashforward. This scene shows Hartnell parked in his car, contemplating his lowest ebb after having got the sack from this wonderful lifeline of a show. A policeman taps on the window and says a loaded line of dialogue "You need to move on, you're in the way."

The action cuts to activity on the set of the TARDIS, showing how the star has got difficult and proprietorial, then uses the device of time travel (the year-o-meter on the TARDIS console rolling back from 1966 to 1963) to end the flashforward and go to the beginning of the story which then plays out in chronological order. The creation of Doctor Who is then essentially a strong subplot that takes over for a while from the main plot of Hartnell's bittersweet late-career renaissance, providing the necessary backstory. It makes the upturns in the careers of Verity, Waris and Hartnell's co-stars downturns for Hartnell as he loses what's familiar to him and has to carry the show on his own. This is still a difficult balancing act to manage, but Gatiss and everyone involved in the production pulls it off. It requires, for example, the actor playing Hartnell to find the perfect mix of his outer gruff and rough edges and his inner sweetness and vulnerability. You know who would have been perfect casting? William flippin' Hartnell, that's who. That's an exact description of the sort of performance he could do in his sleep. In the great man's sad absence, David Bradley is the only acceptable substitute - he inhabits the role, and has continued to do so in his subsequent appearances as the first Doctor in the main show (playing the first Doctor and playing Hartnell, not coincidentally, overlap by a significant margin). Casting throughout is superb, as it needs to be: Sydney Newman, Verity Lambert, Waris Hussein - these are real and important people, and moments of their story need to hit home, even though it is not the main plot. Luckily, every casting decision is bang on: Brian Cox, Jessica Raine, Sacha Dhawan... Lesley Manville as Heather Hartnell... Jeff Rawle... all those playing the regular cast members of Hartnell Who... everyone is magnificent.

Perfect casting is paired with some faithful recreations of key moments in Doctor Who's history. The attention to detail is everything you'd hope for to keep up the sense of reality for the casual viewer and to provide the fans with no ammunition for criticism. The newly made version of the original TARDIS control room and console is a work of art, but even smaller details like the mock-up of the first ever Doctor Who annual are spot on. Seeing the Daleks on Westminster Bridge again, correct to the smallest detail, is amazing. Shooting some beautiful exteriors at Television Centre also helps. There's a certain irreverence in the treatment of this material that stops things from being too stifling, though, such as seeing a wonderfully recreated Mondasian Cyberman having a cigarette break. The script is full of gags, in-jokes and allusions that keep things interesting for viewers, no matter their level of historical knowledge, from the opening scene being set on Barnes Common in the fog (an alternate setting for the start of Doctor Who that David Whittaker created in his novelisation of the first Dalek story) through to Hartnell echoing David's Tennant's last words as the tenth Doctor "I don't want to go". There are also many, many cameos from the original 1960s actors too. Director Terry McDonough pulls all these wonderful elements together with a lot of visual flair. His most bravura sequence is the intercutting of Cox as Newman reading the screenplay for the first Dalek story with scenes of an assassin in Dealey Plaza, preparing his rifle.

It's not perfect, but the moments I can find fault with are minor and few. The script is even-handed in its treatment of William Hartnell generally, but the scene of him being verbally aggressive to his granddaughter didn't ring true based on everything I've ever heard about the man, and it didn't seem necessary to the plot. Patrick Troughton was such a visually distinctive performer that I don't think any other actor could embody him accurately; Gatiss's colleague from the League of Gentlemen comedy team Reece Shearsmith does his best, but it's a tall order to ask of anyone. The surprise of the moment means one might not notice it first time, but the shot of a clearly-not-there-on-the-day Matt Smith on the TARDIS set is very badly composited. Any aspect that doesn't completely work is met by as many as ten magic moments however - the point early on in his getting to grips with the Doctor character where Bradley's Hartnell first gets to grips with his lapels, for example, or the park scene where he acts as the Pied Piper for a group for schoolchildren. Gatiss was interviewed in 2023 about whether there could ever be a sequel to An Adventure in Space and Time, covering a different period in Who's history, as the 1963 start had been covered definitively; he suggested the Trial of a Timelord period, with the difficulties of the show being put on hiatus, and the falling out of members of the production team. It might be a bit too soon still, and it would be a painful watch for a fan, but on the basis of what he achieved in 2013, I'd love to see Gatiss have a go at that tale.

Connectivity:

An Adventure in Space and Time includes a recreation of scenes from The Tenth Planet, so both feature Mondasian Cybermen and the first regeneration of the Doctor.

Deeper Thoughts:

After all, that's how it all started: a book report on Pull to Open by Paul Hayes. Longer-term readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know I had this book - which like An Adventure in Space and Time tells the story of the initial creation of Doctor Who - lined up to be my holiday reading when the family and I went to a Greek Island for a sunny week in August 2023. Alas, it didn't arrive until we'd flown out to Kos. It worked out okay, though: the book's a bit too precious an artefact to have risked reading it poolside. Anyone who knows Stuart Manning's visual Doctor Who work would probably guess that a book published by his Ten Acre Films company would be elegantly put together, and that's definitely the case - it's on good paper stock with clear type and unfussy design touches. Content is king, though, and it doesn't disappoint in that regard either. Author Paul Hayes previously wrote about the genesis of the second iteration of Doctor Who in The Long Game, which I read and reviewed earlier this year (see the Deeper Thoughts of the Midnight blog post). Hayes uses the same overall structure as he did for his previous book, propelling the story forward roughly chronologically, with the occasional 'side bar' chapter focussing on a specific topic (casting the main characters, say, or the creation of the beginning credits and theme tune). There are less side bars than in The Long Game, as that book had to cover a number of different activities that were going on in the wilderness years in parallel with the main narrative about a new series becoming a reality. Here, it's a start from nothing, so it is much more focussed on the single journey from blank page to screen, though that journey takes a few twists and turns.

Each of the two books is describing a slightly different inevitability. The Long Game was the story of pressure gradually building like a weight of water against the dam of (perhaps imagined) rights issues, until the pressure became too much and the dam broke. The forces of antagonism in Pull to Open are not so centred, but are more numerous (inadequate facilities, apathy or misunderstanding from other people or whole departments at the BBC, mistrusting executives worried about budgets, etc. etc.). Instead of water against a dam, a better analogy for what Hayes captures is the story of the collected endeavour of Doctor Who production over time as a novice painter trying to capture a likeness. We know what the inevitable picture will look like, but Hayes gives us an engaging and thorough description of each preliminary sketch or abandoned embryonic attempt. As with The Long Game, he does this by illuminating every character with well-researched potted biographies informed by his understanding of broadcasting and the careers of those who work in it. Even Lime Grove studio D gets a few paragraphs of personal history. Unless you're David Brunt or Andrew Pixley or a similar uber-researcher of Doctor Who, a lot of this material will be new, and some names and life stories will be ones you have not heard before. There are no major new revelations, but a lot of small details are revealed that in aggregate turn this into a fresh take. For example, most fans know that the production team didn't get on well with designer of the first TARDIS console, Peter Brachacki, and felt he wasn't taking the assignment seriously (Gatiss covers this in his dramatisation). This probably was just a misapprehension on everyone's part of some tetchiness caused by Brachacki being ill at the time, imminently to be hospitalised.

The rough timeline is that in 1962, two reports on the potential of science fiction for BBC TV are prepared for the then Controller of Programmes Eric Maschwitz. Around the same time, Sydney Newman - then working at rival ITV company ABC Weekend Television - is offered a job by the corporation as head of drama. He has to wait a while to take up the post and starts in late 1962. Early on in the following year, he has a meeting with executives about concerns with filling a ratings-slump gap on Saturday nights between the football results and music programme Juke Box Jury. In late March 1963, there's a meeting to start the development of a programme to fit in that gap, and by this time it already seems to have been decided for this to be a science fiction series as some of the authors of those 1962 reports are in attendance. A number of different series proposal documents are worked on through to May, and then scripting of the first episode of Doctor Who (apparently at one point it is just possible it could have ended up being called Mister Who) gets underway. Newman hires Verity Lambert to be the producer. Greater or lesser contributions are made by some people who stay close to the series once it gets going (Donald Wilson, David Whittaker, Mervyn Pinfield) and some who fall away (C.E. Webber, Rex Tucker). The main characters are cast, writers are found including Terry Nation, whose script about mutated creatures in personal transport machines is pulled forward to be the second story made as other scripts aren't ready. Hayes lays this all out while also providing context of what was going on in the wider world, which was a lot (the Profumo affair, the Great Train Robbery, UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's shock resignation, The Beatles getting bigger and bigger, historical speeches by John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King).

On the 27th September 1963, after a bit of pre-filming, the pilot episode of Doctor Who goes in front of the cameras. The story thereafter is more familiar, based on many other retellings including An Adventure in Space and Time. The pilot's rejected, they remount, then they finish the caveman story and move on to Terry Nation's Dalek tale. The broadcast of the first episode on November 23rd 1963 is overshadowed by the assassination of JFK the previous day, but the Dalek story captures the public's imagination. The book still has the possibility to surprise even here, though: every fan knows that the Beeb wouldn't at first commit beyond 13 episodes, but I had no idea there was a bit of a wobble about the risk of overspends, and that 13 could have just been four. It's mentioned in passing in An Adventure in Space and Time, and I just thought it was exaggeration to serve the drama, but there was a real possibility that Doctor Who could have just been the caveman story, and everybody would have been ordered back to the drawing board to think of a new idea. Thankfully a compromise position was found, and the rest is history. The 'What Ifs' presented by the narrative are fascinating. Two designers' major contributions to Doctor Who's early years might never have happened: if Brachacki hadn't been in hospital, Barry Newbury wouldn't have needed to take over on the first story; had Verity Lambert not insisted on the same designer working on the Dalek story's filming and studio sessions, then future Hollywood film director Ridley Scott might have designed the Daleks rather than Ray Cusick. Hayes ends the book at the point those first two stories have been broadcast and appreciated by the viewing audience, with a testament to all the many contributions to get to that point and how they have created an expansive story that will never stop being told. It's perfect reading for this anniversary period, and I recommend every fan should get themselves a copy. 

In Summary:

The tale of the Doctor Who's beginnings will undoubtedly continue to be told and retold in different forms, but as a TV bio-pic this is probably the last word on the matter.