Let me focus on the opening sequence for a moment. Sometimes people start by talking about the Bobby in the fog, but that misses out a key segment. We actually open with some swirling, grey-white shapes while strange electronic music plays. This is important; it sets the tone for what is to come. This is not your standard drama, and if I had to put a single word to the mood invoked I would go for eerie. Nowadays it's impossible for me to dissociate the music (or indeed the swirls) from what I already know of Who, so I'm not going to try. Instead, I'll look at what happens next - and what doesn't.
Notably, it doesn't just cut to the Bobby in the fog. It fades, so that the grey-white swirls of alienness merge into grey-white swirls of familiar London fog. Then - with the title music still playing - we see the policeman on his rounds, checking the gates of the scrap yard and moving on before one gate swings open, pushed by an unseen hand. We follow the camera through, look around and close in on the misplaced police box, hearing the hum of the TARDIS for the first time. The image blurs, the noise changes to a sound any schoolchild will recognise, and when the picture comes back into focus we are in a regular school. There's an establishing shot of children leaving at the end of the day, and one of the teachers - Barbara Wright - comes out of one room, talking to someone we can't see, and walks down the corridor to another. Only then do we finally get a straightforward cut.
Why am I spending so much time on the first few minutes of the show? It is said that the opening paragraph - or even sentence - of a book is vital, that failing to grab the reader at the outset means you're done for. If the same is true of TV, An Unearthly Child is on safe ground. In one short but continuous sequence the mood has shifted from eerie to ordinary to mysterious to ordinary again, keeping us disorientated, on our toes; and we are left with a number of questions. Who was it going into the scrap yard? What is a police box doing there? Why was it humming? Why are we now in a school? The sudden cut to the interior of Ian Chesterton's classroom acts as a signal that the story has begun and we can settle down to watch what happens; but we already know it's not going to be anything straightforward.
At this point, I'm going to pause for a couple of asides. The first is to note the age of the schoolchildren, who look to be twenty-odd. This instantly puts me in mind of the slightly later show Please Sir!, which was part of my childhood. There are definitely similarities with Fenn Street; and although it wasn't in a city, the school I attended from 1975 (a Secondary Modern turned Comprehensive) had echoes of Coal Hill too. Perhaps this was why it didn't jar me out of the story - unlike Mawdryn Undead, whose aged public schoolboys put me more in mind of Greyfriars and the 1950s Billy Bunter series.
Second is the incidental music. In my present I have been watching Matt Smith's second series, and (as with all the series since the revival) there is music most of the time. Here, there's nothing. I didn't notice it until late in the scene in Ian's classroom, but it does make a difference. It's one less thing telling you what to feel, which puts more responsibility on to the acting and direction. That can be good or bad, depending upon how it's handled (and whether the viewer is paying attention).
OK, back to the plot - but since the plot from here on is basically a series of introductions, I'm going to break it down and talk about the people and ideas introduced:
Barbara and Ian
It feels odd not to write their names the other way round. It's as if Iananbarbara have become one entity over the years; but here the reversal is appropriate, since Barbara is both the first lead character we see and the driving force throughout the episode. We are quickly given an impression of two thoughtful, reliable teachers who care about their charges. They obviously get on well, but as friendly colleagues - there's no hint of romance. Given what's happened so far, they offer us a reassuringly normal anchor to cling to (if you'll forgive a mixed metaphor - be warned, there may be many more wayward words down the line); and by the end of their first scene together we already feel like we know them. The mystery of this episode is viewed through their eyes, and at the heart of it is the unearthly child of the title...
Susan
Our first sight of Susan is an extreme close-up of her listening to pop music on a portable radio (John Smith - now there's an alias to conjure by). This is the first music since the titles, and later in the scene we'll get the first incidental music of the series. Susan looks like she's "away with the fairies", as they say around here, and generally that's the impression we get from the performance - a girl who's a bit of an outsider, inward-focused, but not, I would say, unearthly. The only thing that pushes her further out is the dialogue. There are some nicely dropped hints and set-pieces, the most obvious one now being the bit about decimalisation. I remember the changeover, which started in 1968; I picked up a little of the old money terminology, but it never had a chance to become ingrained. I wonder how much talk there was about it in 1963, and how prophetic Anthony Coburn was being? As a mathematician I was less impressed with the discussion of five dimensions, although that's mostly the naming - I wouldn't call one "space", since that is itself multi-dimensional. But I'm nitpicking, and there's always going to be something that pushes a particular individual's buttons. Anyway, Susan is the next link in the chain that leads us to her grandfather...
The Doctor and His Ship
When we first see the Doctor, we really aren't sure about him. It sort of looks as if he is keeping Susan locked up in the police box, and although it doesn't feel as if the program is that grim we have been kept off-balance enough to pause. If not, why is he so desperate to keep the teachers out? But then, just as things are hotting up, we have The Oz Moment. Barbara pushes her way past the old man and, like Judy Garland in 1939, steps through a door into another world. This is it; we will not be seeing Earth in 1963 again for a very long time. It's a key transition, revealing the show to be fantasy, and our suspension of disbelief could fail catastrophically. It doesn't, though; the show has kept us enough off-kilter to accept the jump. Although in theory it could have been a mundane show about teachers helping some screwed-up people, it was never going to be - not at 5.15 on a Saturday evening.
The next scene is beautifully handled. We are told just enough that we know where we stand, without revealing too much - and the Doctor becomes less like an ogre and more of a desperate man with no investment in our world. We still can't guess what he's capable of, but at least he has recognisable motivations. All of which comes to a head when Susan threatens to leave, and he activates the machine. As the ship leaves, we see the fear and regret on his face - a great moment from Hartnell that tells us a lot.
I've gone on a bit, but I'd like to mention two more things before signing off. The first is the "falling about in the TARDIS" acting. This is something that will happen throughout the show, but I tend to associate it most with the 80s. To be honest, it's a bit lame here - Peter Davison and Janet Fielding would have been ashamed. And why do Iananbarbara fall asleep?
Finally, I can't help but mention the first cliffhanger of the series. The ship has moved - and they're not alone! Good stuff - and the announcement of the next episode title is something to whet our appetites, with a proper pulpy name.
Broadcast:
Date: Saturday, 23rd November 1963
Viewers: 4.4 million
Chart Position: 114
Appreciation Index: 63
Rating:
10/10. It would be churlish to give it any less.
Next Time:
Not, in fact, The Cave of Skulls, since I'll be taking my first diversion. And hopefully it won't be quite so long...
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