The Film Canary: Whovember Part 1: 1963 to 1965

Welcome to my blog and Whovember! What is Whovember? Well, as this month marks Doctor Who's 60th anniversary, it seems right to celebrate it in style, with a whole month of posts about it. But what to write about? Well, I was toying with a few ideas, including some top ten lists, but social media gave me the idea (despite the efforts of certain emerald mine inheritors, it can still do some good). There has been a trend to do posts of favourite things from each of the show's years, leading up to the anniversary date of the 23rd. So then I realised; 60 years, 30 days in November, why not do that here? Each day I will look back at two years from Who's history, and pick out something from each to talk about. It could be a particular story, a moment in the show itself, an event in the history of the show, a character, anything goes.

Now not all of these will necessarily be my favourite things per se, but they will all be things I think are worth talking about, memories about the show that I treasure and would like to share with you all, to help you understand a bit about why this daft old thing means so much to me. Also, I will almost certainly cheat a little bit, more use the thing that happened on that date to go off on some other tangent, but what the hell, it’s my list, my Who celebration, I’ll do it how I like. Finally, as I said, this is my list, it's likely to be very different to yours so if your favourite Who things aren't on here, don't worry, it's just my opinion. So, firing up the TARDIS wiki to check all these dates (each year will go from November 23rd one year to November 22nd the next), let’s begin!

Year 1: 1963 to 1964 - The very first cliffhanger

One thing I’ll always love about classic Who; its cliffhangers. The series would often know how to hook you to the next episode, and in the modern day of coming back to the show, it does help you if you’re bingeing through a serial, knowing there’ll be something to liven things up every twenty five minutes or so. Sure, not every single one is a winner (Oh no! A floor!), but there are so many memorable ones to pick from (and I will probably mention quite a few across the course of this series of posts). Now from the first series of the show, one I could pick is our very first glimpse of (part of) a Dalek, and that is certainly a good one, not least for Jacqueline Hill giving one hell of a good scream. However, in the end, I have to go with the very first one, from the opening episode An Unearthly Child.

Now the opening episode is quite an introduction to the conceit of the show, going from the very mundane to the truly fantastical in a matter of twenty five, catapulting Ian, Barbara, and the audience, into a grand adventure in Space and Time (hey, that would make a great title!). And the scene to end the episode is almost like a mission statement for what’s to come; the juxtaposition of seeing something that was then very mundane, and already getting a bit old fashioned, a London Police Box, on a strange landscape, with the shadow of someone or something unknown coming towards it. Is there a better summation of the show as a whole than that one image? Now OK, I know that the three episodes of a runaround with some cavemen is one that aren’t exactly fan favourites (a lot of fans do skip straight to that first Dalek serial), but still, that image is a powerful one, and tends to be what I first think of a lot of the time when I think back to that early era of the show. What a way to start the whole thing… wouldn’t it be nice if it could be on iPlayer with the rest, eh Mr. Coburn? (Sorry, sorry, I promised myself I’d stay positive through this thing, won’t do that again!)

Year 2: 1964 to 1965 - The Dalek Invasion of Earth

Now the Dalek Invasion of Earth isn’t actually my favourite from this era of the show, that would be The Time Meddler, but overall have a lot more to say about this one, it means quite a bit more to me; this is one of my first full Doctor Who stories, in the first dozen I experienced… but not in the original TV version. See, in these days of on demand, when all of Who is on iPlayer (except the first seria- NO, BAD EDDY!!!), it can be easy to forget that a lot of this was hard to see, especially if you were a kid who had the incredibly bad timing of getting into the show during the Wilderness Years. So, I had to find what I can, but luckily my local libraries had a whole bunch of Doctor Who books, and so Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, novelised by Terrance Dicks, was one of my first full reads of a Who novel. I was hooked by that cover alone, and then I was sold right from that opening line “Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man.” I got that book out many times to reread, and I still hold a special place in my heart for it to this day; the Target Novels are practically how I learned to read at an adult level. I enjoyed the book version so much (and later the film version; I’ll be talking a bit about both the Cushing films in a future entry), that when I saw the serial itself, I was kind of disappointed by a lot of it, and I’m not going to lie, there are a lot of rough edges to it. (I was terrified by the way the Slither was described in the book, but for the episode itself…) Mind, that’s what kind of comes from a story this ambitious being done on the resources Who had back in the day.

Nowadays I can appreciate the good in it a lot more, and there is a lot of good in here; the opening scene of the Roboman is realised in a great way that the opening line of the book lives up to, something to really make you sit up and pay attention in a big way. This was also where the character of Daleks and the Doctor really got settled upon; in that trailer above, that little moment of William Hartnell I think might be the first moment of the Doctor as the more heroic figure we have come to know and love. The location work is great, especially them using the same trick 28 Days Later would a lot later, shooting at absurdly early on a Sunday morning in London, and we got some indelible images, like the Daleks on Westminster Bridge (which oddly isn't in the episode proper, but has been recreated a lot of times since). There’s also Susan’s departure, played so well by Hartnell and Carol Anne Ford; there’s a good reason why that speech is revisited so often. Plus the Dalek Invasion itself is something that spin-off material has made good use of, with Big Finish audios The Mutant Phase and Masters of Earth returning to it well, along with the aftermath of it being the basis of a lot more great stories. Even its DVD release is in its own way significant, because with the optional CGI effects to replace the… less than impressive flying saucer, that ended up being the prototype for Dalek ships across New Who. It’s one of those titles in the show that, wherever you might place it in your individual episode rankings, there is no denying it’s one of the most important in the entire run, and for me, it still does have a lot of personal significance.