
I’ve Just Watched Every Black and White Doctor Who - Moving Pictures
I’d never watched Doctor Who before November 2023, when I watched the colourised version of The Daleks. My experience with black-and-white media was never a very positive one, so I didn’t fancy going back to episodes from 1963, nor was I willing to jump into the middle of things and risk missing out on important information. But when BBC iPlayer put all of Doctor Who up, I decided to finally check some of it out and see what 60 years of fuss was about. 253 episodes later, I’ve just reached the colour episodes from 1970! Though I’ve not started watching them yet, I literally finished The War Games Part 10 earlier today.
I’m not going to bury the lede, there are a bunch of episodes of Classic Doctor Who which are lost media, which means that they are widely unavailable on DVD, VHS, or anywhere. Some have been animated by professionals and put on iPlayer, others stuck on DVDs were reconstructed from audio and still photos, and still more only exist as audio recorded while the episode played on television. Fans being fans, some of that audio has been animated in awful, terrible Flash animation, with just the worst quality sound — but I appreciate whoever chose to animate them and those who stuck them on YouTube. Since The Celestial Toymaker is being animated for release in 2024, I had to resort to the “audiobook” version on the Doctor Who: The Lost TV Episodes collection.
One of the partially lost serials
Spoiler warning, in case you wanted to watch these early episodes yourself, I’m going to give things away. Since all of my knowledge of Doctor Who was gained through cultural osmosis, I pretty much only knew the basics. The Doctor (no last name) travels through time and space in the TARDIS with a rotating cast of Companions, and because he’s an alien he sometimes just starts looking like someone else. Also, there were these robots called Daleks who wanted to exterminate and couldn’t use stairs.
The first four seasons of Doctor Who star the First Doctor who becomes the Second Doctor in Season 4, up through the end of Season 6. This change comes after First is shown to grow increasingly weak before suddenly changing in the TARDIS in a flash of light. I think. See, the episodes introducing the Second Doctor are lost media, so the changeover survives only in officially animated form, and some of those take liberties with camera angles and shot compositions.
After the change, the Companions are concerned, surprised, curious, and get absolutely zero answers from Second. As Season 6 ends, Second Doctor is being made into Third Doctor, but has no Companions with him to ask questions. So, over 250 episodes in and the audience still has no idea what happens when he changes! Second seemed to suggest that he retained First’s memories, or most of them, and others from his species can still recognise him, but we know little else. The term “regeneration” isn't even used!
One of the most surprising things, actually, is that it took 251 episodes to name the Doctor’s species. We’re told a few times that he isn’t human and doesn’t come from Earth, but it’s not until years later that we get the name “Time Lord”. What planet or galaxy are they from? Still dunno.
Out of the two Doctors, I would say that Second is my favourite as he’s more proactive and quite respectful towards his Companions. I was going to say that he’s funnier, but on consideration their humour is just different.
Now, let’s look at the Companions, of which there were several. Since The Daleks was the second serial, I admit that the first Companions came off poorly when I watched that. It would be some time before I eventually watched the first serial, so I had no idea why two teachers were with the Doctor and his granddaughter. However, I did enjoy their contributions to the show throughout their tenure, and missed them when they were gone.
While some of the women who joined the TARDIS crew were merely used to scream at whatever Monster Of The Week they faced, I think a special shout-out has to go to Katarina. She joined the Doctor for five episodes, and in the fifth, she sacrificed herself to get them out of the previous episode’s cliffhanger. That was four minutes into the episode, so technically she was only in four episodes. Imagine you’re that actor and you book Doctor Who, a series that has been going for three seasons and has proven quite popular, then you’re killed off almost immediately. To add insult to injury, you’re killed off in the very serial where a guest character appears in eight episodes!
My favourite Companion has to be Jamie McCrimmon, an 18th-century Scottish man. He has some fantastic lines and is fiercely loyal, leaping into danger with little prompting. Sure, there are plenty of brave and capable Companions, but Jamie always proved to be the bravest and most capable. Sure, at times he had zero chill, but I was genuinely upset when he was sent back to his own time.
I was surprised at how often the Daleks appeared, if I’m completely honest. Also, they turned out to be aliens in tanks, rather than simply robots. I figured that the props were difficult or expensive to run, but they kept popping up! They actually appeared at least once in five of the six seasons, with a still image of one popping up in the sixth season. As such, they definitely come across as First Doctor villains.
My least favourite episode
Who are the Second Doctor’s main villains? The Cybermen, who look different in almost every single appearance. That’s because the costumes were awful, so they obviously decided to improve things as the budget allowed. But they appeared in far more Second episodes than the Daleks, so much so that I began suspecting non-Cybermen plots to actually be Cybermen plots in disguise! Not bad for a race that began as having come from Earth’s twin that span off into the galaxy for millennia. However, they don’t appear in as many episodes overall as the Daleks.
If you’re going to have an issue with how things look, because they were created five decades ago, then you should probably skip Classic Who on the whole. I imagine Modern Who has CGI, which might look better than silver rubber suits and cardboard. However, if you can give them a pass because you have a suspension of disbelief in this show about a time-travelling alien, then I highly recommend checking them out. While I probably won’t re-watch them, I definitely don’t regret spending all of these hours watching William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, and their various co-stars. However, I do recommend watching at 1.5x speed, the Doctor Who serials just fly past, and it ratchets up the camp insanity.
It only took me 17 weeks from finishing Season 1 to completing Season 6, so I should have all of Classic Doctor Who done in about two and a half years. Maybe a little faster, since I won’t keep having to search YouTube and DVDs! Now to find out what kind of Doctor Jon Pertwee was…
COMMENTS
Wiki McInfo - 12:09am, 24th May 2024
"I figured that the [Dalek] props were difficult or expensive to run, but they kept popping up!"
Bwahahahahahaha! Doctor Who didn't do "expensive" at any point in its original 26-year run. The Dalek props were run by men inside bicycling them around and manually turning the heads and pressing a button to make the lights flash with the dialogue. They were able to see through the grills in the Dalek prop's "neck."
Acelister - 07:36am, 24th May 2024 Author
Ahh, bicycles! I had wondered, given how they sped up going down ramps! I've been trying to avoid wikis for spoilers, but obviously it has left me with questions.
It's either a testament to how good the special effects (such as the Daleks) were, OR how absolutely gullible I am.
Wiki McInfo - 04:50pm, 24th May 2024
I think it's absolutely charming that you looked at 1960s Daleks and thought that they must be some sort of expensive remote controlled robotic props. After all, that was the intention of the production team!
Andrew Gilbertson - 06:42pm, 10th July 2024
Welcome to the club! I took this journey during David Tennant's gap year in 2009; and I absolutely fell in love with Patrick Troughton in the process! Still my favorite Doctor. I really appreciate your dedication in watching through the missing episodes. Not everyone does, but there are some real gems in there.
It was a lot of fun, reading this journey again from a enwcomer's perspective. Also, realizing my own watchthrough of this was 15 years ago... makes me feel very old. :-)
Andrew Gilbertson - 06:44pm, 10th July 2024
Also, don't blame you for not being a fan of the Zarbi. ;-)
Did you know the shows were made essentially live? Pre-filmed inserts were played in, and occasionaly they could get an (expensive) recording break, but generally, this was being done like a stage play (which is why Hartnell's flubs are often left in). When you don't see characters in a scene, they're often running aorund the back of the set to get in position for their next scene! With that perspective, it's pretty impressive what they managed to accomplish sometimes.
Peter Hale - 09:23pm, 25th May 2025
I'm British, and watched Doctor Who from its beginning, although I inevitably missed the occassional episode. I started to lose interest during Sylvester McCoy's run as the Doctor, when the 'camp' element started to dominate and the scripts became rather silly (I enjoy 'campness' for its own sake, but I took "Doctor Who" seriously!), but the final death blow to the original series, the change of broadcasting day from Saturdays (at 5.15 pm, prime child/family viewing time) to Fridays (children only) meant that as I was now at work, I could no longer see it.
The show was not actually broadcast live, but was recorded to video tape in one go, as was much TV in those days. TV had started as radio-with-pictures, either broadcasting live from the studio or transmitting the signal from a telecine machine running a completed film. When video-recording came in it was used to make a recording of the transmission, so that it could be repeated if required, and then copied onto film. Unlike audio tape, which, being an analogue signal, could be cut and spliced at will, video tape carried scanning information and could only be edited by copying, a more complicated and expensive process that would impinge on a limited budget better spent on production. Once a film copy had been made, the valuable video tape was wiped for re-use.
Unfortunately the BBC film library junked a lot of old films in the 70s to make more space.
The BBC is, of course, a public service broadcaster, and the original brief, when a SF series featuring time travel was proposed for the Saturday children's time-slot, was that it should have educational value regarding history and science, and "no bug-eyed monsters".
The idea of an old man, Dr Who, with no memory but flashes of intuition, suspicious of those around him and with possible malicious intent, and travelling in a stolen and malfunctioning time machine that looked like a police box but was bigger on the inside, became the starting point for the series. It was intended that the TARDIS would use its 'chameleon' circuit to appear as an object that blended in with its locale (hence a Police Box in 1960s London) but the added expense of such regular changes of props made them opt for the 'broken circuit' idea, with the TARDIS stuck at 'Police Box'. As work on scripts progressed the malice and memory loss were reduced to just 'crotchety old man' behaviour.
The first story took the Doctor and his companions back to the stone age, but the second on was Terry Nation's 'Dalek' script -- which crossed the 'bug-eyed monster' line. But the only other script ready was the one that had originally been the first story but had been put on hold as too expensive to make on the budget -- a story where instead of travelling in time the TARDIS shrunk them all to 5 or six inches tall. So the Dalek story made it by default. Its success 'made' Dr Who, and gave the BBC one of its earliest mercantising opportunities.
The strength of the stories was not in their low budget production values -- although in the circumstances these are remarkably good -- but in the scripts, which spun out an exciting
story with lots of twists and turns.
The original title for the episode was 'The Mutants' and the Tardis arrives on the highly radio-active planet Skaro. An atomic was has divided the population into two mutant species: a humanoid, pacifist race, the Thraals, and the Daleks -- whose genetically regressed bodies are housed in mechanical shells. The Daleks inhabit a technologically advanced city, and are powered by static electricity from the city's floors. (This was their first limitation -- they could not leave the city.) They plan the total extermination of the Thraals.
Like all early Dr Who monsters, the Daleks are a tribute to the ingenuity of the design team on a miniscule budget. And as a result were very uncomfortable for the operators. The shape derives from the pepper pot that Nation used in the BBC canteen to demonstrate the gliding motion he wanted the Daleks to have, moderated by the need to incorporate the tricycles that the operators sat on. The use of a plunger for an arm is a smart bit of lateral thinking when you have to build four identical mechanical shells on a shoe-string budget. It is just a pity that the Dalek city sets didn't feature any plunger-shaped controls!
Along with the the innovative title sequence (visuals created from the feedback of a camera pointing at a monitor, together with the unearthly theme music, composed by Ron Grainer but meticulously created and pieced together by Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Rdiophonic Workshop) and the permanent 'Police Box' exterior, the Daleks added to the feeling that Doctor Who was something unique. (With all the wonders of digital image creation The new Doctor Who series have failed to come up with anything as 'different' as those original titles.)
I think Troughton was probably my favourite doctor. The first transformation (I may be wrong, but think the word 'regeneration' was used from the start) resulted in Troughton being like an old-man-child, having no conscious recollections and treating everything as a game, while taking time out to sit down and play the recorder! His memories slowly returned over time, but this aspect of "I don't have a clue! We'll have to see what happens!" just helped to add to the tension.
Oh, yes -- the Zarbis. Giant ant-like creatures on an insect-dominated planet. I think all the budget went on the costumes -- which were probably the most uncomfortable (I have an idea they were actually harmful) ones the series ever produced. There was certainly no budget for sets, which as I recall were what the theatre calls 'presentational' -- simple blocks, masses and sheets of webbing that you have to imagine represent mounds, tunnels, etc.
Perhaps the budget for that went to realising (or trying to realise -- it didn't really work too well) the aforementioned 'shrunk' script.