There are a lot of different timescales to consider when thinking about a TV program, even in the 1960s with its relatively compressed production schedule. For the actors it generally takes place over a week, with rehearsals up until Friday evening when the actual shooting takes place. At this point in the show's history there is no location shooting so the main exception is the filming of necessary sequences at Ealing Studios, which had better facilities than Lime Grove Studio D where the show was based. After shooting came editing, but not too much because of the expense of the tape, and then a gap of a couple of weeks before broadcast (down a week since the episode 5 remount). All this means that everyone on the production has moved on to something else by the time it airs.
The episodes don't begin with the actors, though. Before that there's the scriptwriting (usually involving multiple drafts), and before that the story needs to be commissioned. Which means it all needs to start a few months before viewers finally get to see anything. And that can sometimes be a problem.
In this case, the story after The Daleks needed to be commissioned when the BBC had only agreed to a run of 13 episodes. Verity Lambert and David Whitaker were confident and went for another long story, but when filming began on the second serial with the extension still not agreed they decided they needed a two-parter to potentially round things off - just in case. There was also a problem with money. For most drama series, there are a number of sets that are reused in nearly every episode. This wasn't true of Doctor Who; the only set that recurred between stories was the TARDIS interior, and that was seen mostly at the beginning and the end. Lambert had planned to amortise the cost of this set over a longer period, and if the show was to finish early that would not be possible, so there was virtually no budget for the final two episodes. An episode set entirely within the ship made sense financially, and offered a good excuse to avoid paying for a guest cast. Whitaker decided the only option was to write it himself, beginning a long tradition of pinch-hitting script editors. This was somewhat frowned on at the BBC, and he only got official permission to do so after the first episode had been broadcast!
Two-parters are something of an oddity in Doctor Who. There's another next season which introduces Vicki, then no more for a decade (when an unworkable six-parter was replaced by a four and a two), then none until long stories fell out of favour in the 1980s. Because of fixed costs such as sets episodes in longer stories are generally cheaper to produce, but sometimes two parts is the ideal length. Both of the Hartnell ones work really well; any more episodes would have spoiled them. This one in particular is an underrated gem - although not so good as The Rescue, it gets far worse press. I like the way it uses one episode to set up the mystery, then the second not only to solve it but to show us that - from a storytelling point of view - it's not the solution that's important but how the characters learn and grow along the way.
Inside the Spaceship was Whitaker's preferred title for the story. Confusingly it was sometimes called Beyond the Sun (an early name for the previous serial), and both episode titles have also been used, although (as usual) the first episode won out.
20-20 Hindsight, Part 1: Birth of a Cultural Icon
So, that could have wrapped up a short-lived, creative series, a footnote in TV history. But it didn't. The BBC had high hopes for it from the start, and invested more effort in publicity than was common at the time; William Hartnell was also supremely confident that it had legs. By the end of the first block of 13 episodes it still isn't quite the show we know now, but the groundwork is there (and the rest of the first series has been guaranteed). I've talked about a lot of the recognisable elements as I went along, but I just want to take stock of where we've got to.
First, there's the premise of the show: a strange man in a 1960s police box (bigger on the inside), who can travel anywhere in space and time. This is nailed in the first episode, and never changes. It's a glorious idea, offering so much scope, and the episodes we've seen so far have demonstrated that well.
An Unearthly Child also introduced the idea of the Doctor's companions. The role of the companion has changed over the years, and hasn't yet settled down into any sort of formula - but the initial antagonism seems to be resolved, in a "story arc" that also sees the beginning of the Doctor's evolution from a scared and selfish old man into the heroic adventurer of later years.
Finally, there's the monsters. It's not yet primarily a monster show (and won't be for some time), but the Daleks gave the show the shot in the arm it needed to become successful, and their influence is immense.
The journey has begun.
Rating:
Single Sitting: 7/10.
Episodic: 8/10.
DWM Mighty 200: 60.15%, 158th.
2010 Gallifrey Base Non-Dynamic Rankings: 5.89, 156th out of 211.
Next Time:
I'm going to be taking a break for a while to do summer holiday stuff, and to get a bit ahead again (I'm only on episode three of Marco Polo at the moment). Now might be a good time to post any thoughts on how it's going so far. Don't worry, though - in the words of Captain Jack Harkness in The Stolen Earth, "I'm coming back!"
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