OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 002
STORY NUMBER: 001
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 30 November 1963
FIVE FACES OF DOCTOR WHO REPEAT: Tuesday 03 November 1981
WRITER: Anthony Coburn
DIRECTOR: Waris Hussein
SCRIPT EDITOR: David Whitaker
PRODUCER: Verity Lambert
RATINGS: 5.9 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: DVD - The Beginning Boxset
"If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cries of strange birds, and watch them wheel in another sky, would that satisfy you?"
The Tardis' arrival has been observed by a caveman, Kal. Huddled in the nearby caves a tribe of cavemen watches as their new leader, Za, attempts to make fire. When Ian comes round he is disbelieving of the Doctor's claims that the Tardis has travelled in time & space until the Doctor opens the doors and they step out into the barren landscape. The Doctor goes off to take some readings, while Susan notices that the ship's shape hasn't changed and it's still stuck as a 1963 London Police Box. As the Doctor tries to light his pipe he is attacked and knocked out by Kal who takes him back to the tribe intending to use the Doctor's fire making abilities to make him leader. Ian, Barbara and Susan follow and attempt to rescue the Doctor but all four are imprisoned in a cave full of cleaved skulls.
Oh the shadow we saw last episode is a cavemen..... watching in 1981 I think I was disappointed to find that the shadow wasn't some alien creature!
But back in 1963 Doctor Who had a semi educational brief to show historical situations. So we travel back in time to when Cavemen are learning to make fire, which is the foundation of almost all technology today. In 1981 it bored me to tears, lots of talking about fire and getting menaced by cavemen, and I thought that it's not even on the same planet quality wise as the previous episode.
We do get the famous "Doctor Foreman", "Doctor Who?" exchange between the Doctor and Ian, while Ian & Barbara discuss the mystery of who the old man is. Following a throw away line in an Unearthly Child about having found a spare part we now discover that the Tardis instruments are faulty and what's more it's stuck as a Police Box where it's meant to change. We also get a line that will become important in a few episodes time: before they leave the ship Susan checks the radiation levels. As we'll see the changing of the ship's shape isn't the only thing that's gone wrong with the Tardis.
Ian's doubt continues until he very moment when the doors of the Tardis open revealing the barren landscape outside.
Once on the surface he becomes very quiet and subdued realising that he was completely wrong and way beyond his understanding. And then, prompted by Barbara's use of the name Doctor Foreman for the old name he asks what's become and important question:
"That's not his name. Who is he? Doctor Who? Perhaps if we knew his name we might have a clue to all this?"Out on the surface we very nearly get to see the Doctor do something that would be unthinkable for him now: he's lighting a pipe, obviously to smoke it. It says something about changing attitudes that this would have been considered acceptable then in what was essentially a children's program.
And yet it's integral to the story: Kal needs to see the Doctor make fire so he captures him. I'm wondering if this small scene contributed to the delay in confirming that this story would be repeated for the 50th anniversary. I suppose now we'd have probably needed the Doctor to have lit a branch to see by in the fading light.
The fire-making ability is key to the entire power struggle that drives the remaining three episodes of the first Doctor Who story, occasionally termed the Tribe of Gum. Why Gum? I've no idea. Za's Father, the previous leader of the tribe, has died suddenly without passing the fire-making skill to his son who wishes to take up his Father's position. In competition with him is Kal, a recent arrival who says his tribe were killed by the cold. Kal's already being called a liar here and I'm wondering just how much of his statement about the fate of his tribe is true. Behind them we have the two power brokers in the Tribe: Horg, who also seems to have come from another tribe wiped out by the cold, whose daughter is the prize for the victor in the leadership contest, and the scheming Old Mother. The Old Mother makes an alarming prediction that "Fire will be the death of us all" during this episode... accurate in he case because she'll be dead by the time this first story is over but at the time this story was broadcast perhaps prophetic in terms of the nuclear tensions the world was involved in with the Cuban Missile Crisis having occurred the year before.
A big hurrah for an early showing for an old Doctor Who staple at the end of this episode: if in doubt throw the Doctor and his friends in a cell, or in this case a Cave. The Skulls make it quite clear what their intended fate is .....
My word that is a lingering shot on the skulls at the end of the episode, another thing that I suspect they wouldn't have gotten away with now!
Derek Newark who plays Za, the cavemen's leader, returns to Doctor Who as Greg Sutton in 1970's Inferno, directed by Douglas Camfield. He's got an Out of This World to his name too appearing as Inspector Wright in Vanishing Act.
Alethea Charlton, who plays Hur, appears much sooner as Edith in 1965's The Time Meddler, also directed Douglas Camfield. She appears in the second season Doomwatch episode In the Dark as Flora Seton and the fourth season Out of the Unknown episode This Body is Mine as Ann Meredith. These two series were both devastated by the BBC's archival purges but both of her episodes exist and can be found on Simply's Doomwatch DVD and the BFI's Out of the Unknown DVD Set.
Kal is played by Jeremy Young who returns as Gordon Lowery in 1965's Mission to the Unknown. He too is in Doomwatch playing Vincent Llewellyn in The Battery People and has a later contribution to BBC Science Fiction as Count de Ricordeau in The Tripods. In Space: 1999 he plays Jack Barlett in the second season two parter The Bringers of Wonder.He can be seen in first series The Sweeney episode The Placer as Wren and as Geiser in The Professionals episode Slush Fund. At the time An Unearthly Child was made he was married to Kate O'Mara, later to be the Rani in Doctor Who. 17 years later Kate O'Mara's second husband Richard Willis would appear in Full Circle.
Eileen Way, playing the Old Mother, returns as Karela in 1979's Creature from the Pit and is also in the 1966 film Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. as the Old Woman. New series writer/executive producer Russell T Davies used her in his acclaimed Children's drama Century Falls.
The final named tribesman is Horg, Hur's Father, played by Howard Lang who is the only member of the guest cast without a return Doctor Who appearance. He later finds fame as Captain Baines in The Onedin Line.
Most of the Tribe's Children in this episode are only in this episode: Antonia Moss is the only one to return to Doctor Who playing an Alien Priest in Colony In Space. There's a Julie Moss amongst the children too, her sister? IMDB and several other sources identify Trevor Thomas as appearing in Space: 1999 as the Refuel Eagle Pilot in Space Warp. The same actor is Leroy Garner in The Sweeney episode The Bigger They Are and Zadie in the infamous unbroadcast The Professionals episode Klansmen. David Rosen is the only child actor in this episode who does return in the remaining episodes of the story.
We'll cover the rest of the Tribe in episode 3 but it's worth noting here that Margot Maxine was booked to appear as a Tribeswomen but left studio during camera rehearsals as she was unwilling to be seen on screen with her teeth painted black!
Behind the scenes there's a small personnel shuffle for this episode as designer Barry Newbery joins the production replacing Peter Brachacki, the designer for An Unearthly Child both in it's broadcast and pilot incarnations.
That was the only work Brachacki did for the show but Newbery would become one of Doctor Who's most regular and longest lasting contributors returning many times over the years for Marco Polo (which was directed by this story's director Waris Hussein) and then the following historical series The Aztecs. Hussein's production assistant on this story Douglas Camfield used Newbery for his first three full directing jobs on the serial next: The Crusade, The Meddler and The Dalek Masterplan. He'd then work on The Ark, The Gunfighters, The Dominators (his only Troughton story), The Silurians (his only Pertwee) followed by The Brain of Morbius, the Masque of Mandragora and the Invisible Enemy (all featuring Tom Baker as the Doctor) before finishing with 1984's The Awakening for Peter Davison's Doctor.
This episode was transmitted 15 minutes later than the planned time of 5:15 and preceded by a repeat of the first episode of Doctor Who An Unearthly Child.
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