N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
An Unearthly Child is simply one of the greatest episodes of television ever made. There – I’ve said it! Doctor Who may well have gone on to bigger and better serials than this opening four-parter, but that very first episode, the one that’s actually titled An Unearthly Child, is just spellbinding from start to finish.
“I was born in another time, another world …”
Susan, An Unearthly Child
After its wonderfully eerie and, aptly, timeless opening theme tune and credits, at first you might almost think you’re actually about to get a slice of early 60’s social realism. What could pass for PC Dixon searching the Steptoes’ yard is followed by two schoolteachers discussing the ups-and-downs of a pupil’s education.
Any such thoughts are dispelled the moment Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton stumble into the Doctor and Susan’s otherworldly TARDIS. Nothing is ever the same again – for them or for us.
I’ve always felt that as a serial (whether you call it An Unearthly Child or – perhaps more accurately – 100,000 BC or indeed something else), this story works as a one-parter leading into a three-parter in much the same way that, later, The Seeds of Doom would feel like a two-parter leading into four.
Whilst the succeeding episodes never quite match the heights of the first, there’s much to enjoy in them. The Cave of Skulls has that moment of artistic (and truth-be-told economic) genius when the Doctor and Susan realise the TARDIS is stuck in twentieth century Police Box form.
“Fear makes companions of all of us …”
The Doctor, The Forest of Fear
The Forest of Fear sees the Doctor apparently about to bludgeon a caveman and as a whole the episodes set in the Stone Age are as grim and grisly as they come. Doctor Who was rarely, if ever, this dark again.
And of course Doctor Who as a show being a serial of serials, it all rather wonderfully leads into straight into the intriguingly-titled The Dead Planet, with its evidently high radiation.
One final thought on the untransmitted pilot version of the episode: it’s often been commented that in re-recording An Unearthly Child the production team were able to soften the Doctor’s character, but it’s also true that the whole production benefits from the re-staging, both technically, where the camera bumps and wobbles are gone and the troublesome TARDIS doors stay shut, and in performance, where it seems all four protagonists took the opportunity to tweak their delivery.
Had this pilot been the transmitted version, I still think the show would have gone on to succeed – there were, after all, Daleks on the way a few weeks later – but it’s to our benefit that Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert saw it could be better still if tweaked and re-recorded, for the transmitted version is as mesmerising a piece of television as they come.
