Paul Hayes
Writer and radio producer
Doctor Who belongs to all of us
Not simply figuratively, in the way it has managed to embed itself in British popular culture and the public consciousness. But also literally – because it belongs to the BBC. It wasn’t brought to the Corporation by an outside writer or a production company. It was created within the BBC by BBC employees working on BBC time. A symbol itself of the creative possibilities of the organisation and its staff.
The Creators
There is a very long list of people without whom Doctor Who would never have made it to the screen in the form that we know it on November 23 1963; the likes of Verity Lambert, CE Webber, David Whitaker, Delia Derbyshire, and many more. But without any and all of those, there would still have been a Doctor Who of some sort.
There are two people, however, for whom that’s not true. Sydney Newman, the Head of Drama at the BBC in 1963 who initiated the idea of the programme, and Donald Wilson, Head of Drama Serials within Newman’s department, who along with Newman created the format of the show and may well have named it.
Neither man could ever have guessed just how long their creation would last, or the impact that it would have. However, in the earliest files relating to Doctor Who held at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre at Caversham in Berkshire, there are indications that they did see that the programme had the potential to be something special.
“If things go reasonably well and the right facilities can be made to work, we will have an outstanding winner,” Newman wrote to BBC1’s Chief of Programmes Donald Baverstock in May 1963.
That November, three weeks before the show finally made it to the air, Wilson wrote to the editor of the Radio Times with surely the most prophetic pre-launch prediction for Doctor Who. “I myself believe that we have an absolute knock-out in this show and that there will be no question but that it will run and run.”
Early fans
Some of the most charming fragments of history in those Doctor Who files at Caversham, though, come not from the production documentation but from the occasional evidence of just what a hold the programme took upon its viewers at an early stage. Such as the letter from Miss Linda Chappell of Gloucestershire in March 1964, which survives in one of the files concerning the first Dalek serial.
Miss Gay Knight wrote to the BBC in November that same year after a power cut meant she missed the final episode of the serial Planet of Giants: “We cannot possibly go through the whole week wondering how Dr. Who got out of the wash-basin…” she pleaded.
At the time when Gay was writing her letter, Doctor Who’s appeal was already proving to be cross-generational. An audience research report on the opening episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the next one broadcast following Gay’s note, records how “My children introduced me to this series. I’m glad they did!” was “Representative from the majority of the sample who much enjoyed this episode.” The report further notes that, “Viewers sometimes said that they realised these adventures were principally for juvenile consumption, but they too found them exciting and entertaining.” Another specimen comment given was “My family has been talking about it all week!”
Contemporary fans
Linda and Gay lived in an age where once a television programme had been shown, it was gone forever; bar a very unlikely repeat, there was no way you could possibly get to see it again. But even now, when such information can be called up instantly and any episode of Doctor Who watched at any time, those enigmatic black-and-white images still hold the power to entrance and even to move. To take just as much of a hold on a 21st century viewer coming to them fresh as they did upon Linda and Gay.
One of the most viewed genres on YouTube is the reaction video – people watching a film, or a television programme, or a music video, or anything which they haven’t seen before, and recording live their responses to it, Gogglebox-style.
And one of the most popular Doctor Who reactors, ‘Sesskasays’, has been making her way through the series from the beginning. When you see her shed real tears of sorrow as the First Doctor’s companions Ian and Barbara leave the TARDIS at the end of the 1965 serial The Chase, it shows the very special impact of this series. To provoke such emotion in someone so entirely removed from the culture and the time in which the episode was made.
The likes of Linda and Gay in the 1960s and many of those you will find making reaction videos and engaging in all kinds of fan activities show the diversity of those who have come to love Doctor Who down the decades – a far more varied fanbase, especially now, than the ‘pasty white boys in glasses’ stereotype. A diversity which in the past few years has come to be reflected far more prominently on-screen in the casting of Jodie Whittaker and then Ncuti Gatwa in the show’s leading role.
So yes, Doctor Who belongs to all of us. And its power to fascinate and to beguile means that the programme will continue to belong to many more generations to come.
Written by Paul Hayes, writer and radio producer.
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