In The Beginning…
The junkyard is a perfect place to begin. A discard pile of the ordinary, it sets the tone for a show built on the magic of incongruity – where a police box is a spaceship, a schoolgirl is An Unearthly Child, and a curmudgeonly old man is the gateway to all of time and space. From the outset, Doctor Who isn’t a tidy proposition. It’s a swirling bricolage of the educational and the uncanny, the mundane and the mythic, somehow colliding to form something far greater than the sum of its parts. Susan may have seemed strange in the classroom, but it’s her grandfather who turns out to be the true enigma – defensive, irascible, and utterly alien.
An Unearthly Child is a serial in four acts but only one of them is legend. The opening episode – a masterclass in mystery-building and uneasy wonder – establishes the framework for everything that follows: the TARDIS as a space outside of time and logic, the Doctor as someone who initially needs dragging into heroism, and the notion that science fiction can be as much about the people who get swept up in it as the technology or the monsters. When the show first aired in November 1963, the BBC thought it was launching an educational adventure series. It ended up spawning one of the most elastic and enduring mythologies in television.
The story begins with Coal Hill School teachers Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) and Ian Chesterton (William Russell), who are concerned about their unusually precocious student Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford). Their concern leads them to 76 Totter’s Lane, where they discover her home is not a building but a blue police box, hiding something impossible inside. What follows is a tense standoff with her grandfather, known only as the Doctor (William Hartnell), who kidnaps them rather than risk exposure. He’s not a kindly guide. He’s suspicious, patronising, even a touch cruel – and all the more compelling for it.
That first episode still feels fresh, eerie, and sharply realised. But from episode two onwards, the story pivots into a starker, more primitive register – quite literally. The TARDIS crew are thrust into a Stone Age power struggle where the control of fire equals authority. There are no monsters here, just desperation and the slow realisation that survival sometimes means compromise. It’s a dramatic comedown from the sci-fi intrigue of the premiere, but it’s also where the series’ moral spine begins to calcify. The Doctor, who had been willing to brain someone with a rock to avoid inconvenience, begins to soften. It’s not quite redemption – that takes time – but it’s the start of a journey from exile to example that will meander its way across countless incarnations and over six decades of television.
From a modern perspective, the transition from the crackling enigma of episode one to the sluggish tribal squabbling of the next three is a tonal gear shift that barely sticks the landing. The cave-dwellers’ scenes stretch a thin allegory about Promethean politics and fear across far too many minutes of grunting and posturing. But even here, there’s value: the scenes of Ian trying to teach the tribe compassion and of Barbara’s horror at the Doctor’s callousness are the earliest seeds of the show’s moral dialectic. These aren’t just travellers in time; they’re people who affect and are affected by the worlds they visit.
Historically, An Unearthly Child materialised at a point in time the world would come to recognise as a social and geopolitical pivot point, airing the day after President Kennedy’s assassination, its first broadcast partially overshadowed by extended news coverage and national shock. The BBC ended up repeating the episode the following week – a rare concession to current events, but one that inevitably helped solidify the show’s early traction. And yet, for all the awkwardness around its debut, the series managed to arrive with its DNA already largely mapped out. The TARDIS, the central cast, the notion of exploring the past and future – it’s all there, right from the beginning. The tone would change, and quite quickly too. Daleks were waiting in the wings, ready to explode the programme into a mainstream cultural phenomenon. But even that was part of the series blueprint, one that endures to this day: new Doctor? Well then, one adventure to the past, next adventure to the future. One on Earth, one out in the cosmos.
The performances are a fascinating study in contrast. Hartnell’s Doctor is angular and unknowable – closer to Prospero than oddball Professor – but there are moments where a twinkle escapes the sternness. Jacqueline Hill and William Russell anchor the madness with genuine warmth and authority, grounding the show in human perspective and while Carole Ann Ford is given the least to do after the first episode, her wide-eyed energy hints at a show still deciding how much of its future belongs to the stars, how much to the supporting players and hedging its bets on who the audience would latch on to.
From a modern vantage, An Unearthly Child is a promising prototype rather than a polished pilot. The serial’s second half has aged less gracefully – not due to effects or costumes, but in pacing and focus. But as a foundation, it’s remarkably assured. It understood the power of mystery, the allure of the unknown, and the thrill of asking “what if?” long before it had the budget or confidence to chase down those answers at speed.
It ends not with triumph but with tension – a new danger already on the horizon, the TARDIS crew bruised but now bonded together. There’s no fanfare, no promise of adventure, just the flickering image of a future unwritten. Sixty years on, that promise has become a legacy, but it all began with two teachers, a scrapyard, and a grumpy old man who thought he knew better. He didn’t. But he learned.
