Doctor Who: 1963 BBC Reports & Notes> The SF Report part 1

Before we can get to 1963, the first two reports in this series (see last week’s prologue for the full details and where to download these reports to read along) from 1962 had to exist.

In 1962, the BBC’s Head Of Light Entertainment, Eric Maschwitz commissioned reports on science fiction from the Head Of Serials at the BBC Drama Department. From there the reports were given to Donald Baverstock, Controller of BBC Television until 1995, who then commissioned Sydney Newman, Head Of Drama at BBC, to make a science fiction series. The end result was Doctor Who. Geez even in 1962 there were a lot of sub bosses. Also, funny to see how many heads we’re going to be dealing with given how little brains the BBC seems to have a times, especially here in 2025.

Two reports were commissioned, the first by Donald Bull & Alice Frick, which we’re looking at today, and the other by Alice Frick and Donald John Braybon, which we’ll get to when we’re done with this one. I have no idea who they are. There’s no entry for them in the TARDIS Fandom wiki. Science fiction was still happening on British television thanks to Out Of This World, a sci-fi horror anthology on BBC, and the early “Supermarionation” productions by Gerry Anderson for competitor ITV. Movies and novels also scratched that itch, so I wonder what they were curious about? If those shows were doing well, and any American imported sci-fi also did well, you should already have your answer. That’s the government for you. Anyway, let’s see what was in that first report.

BBC ARCHIVE
WRITTEN DOCUMENT 1962

[Handwritten note: Report by Donald Bull to HSD. Tel. – head of Serial Drama,
television – 1962]

Wait, you have to put down that the note was handwritten? Was Bull’s handwriting that close to a typewriter?

SCIENCE FICTION

1. We have been asked to survey the field of published science fiction, in its relevance to BBC Television Drama.

2. In the time allotted, we have not been able to make more than a sample dip, but we have been greatly helped by studies of the field made by Brian Aldiss, Kingsley Amis, and Edmund Crispin, which give a very good idea of the range, quality and preoccupations of current SF writing. We have read some useful anthologies, representative of the best SF practitioners and these, with some
extensive previous reading, have sufficed to give us a fair view of the subject. Alice Frick has met and spoken with Brian Aldiss, who promises to make some suggestions for further reading. It remains to be seen whether this further research will qualify our present  tentative conclusions.

Given that there’s a follow-up report I guess it wasn’t enough. Also, get used to the big words. It’s British for one thing, and the British Broadcasting Company is a government network, like PBS in the stated but bigger and paid by a license fee to use ordinary TV at all. With the internet I’m hearing people cancelling their license due to some of the decisions made at the BBC. I’m not sure how their radio works, but given that I’ve listened to stuff from BBC Radio before VPNs even existed I’m guessing it doesn’t have the same limitation.

3. Several facts stand out a mile. The first is that SF is overwhelmingly American in bulk. This presumably means that, if we are looking for writers only, our field is exceptionally narrow, boiling down to a handful of British writers.

Do they just mean on television? Some of the great writers of science fiction were European, primarily England and France. Books and movies were still being made but few of them were British in 1962? Interesting.

4. SF is largely a short story medium. Inherently, SF ideas are short-winded. The interest invariably lies in the activating idea and not in character drama. Amis has coined the phrase “idea as hero” which sums it up. The ideas are often fascinating, but so bizarre as to sustain conviction only with difficulty over any extended treatment.

That’s not completely wrong back then. Radio shows used to take a few episodes to tell some stories, and so did newspaper and anthology comics. Novels, however were still pretty long. There were anthologies, but while nothing was War & Peace sized to my knowledge, the novels were still average length. Doctor Who on the other hand usually lasted four episodes a story arc, with one going for two episodes in the first season and the third storyline, now collectively known as “The Daleks”, going for six. If that’s what they though sci-fi was back then, they opted to buck the system. Maybe we’ll get a reason in the follow-up?

5. These remarks apply largely to the novels too. Characterisation is equally spare. People are representative, not individual. The ideas are usually nearer to Earth — in every sense — and nearer to the contemporary human situation. They are thus capable of fuller treatment in depth. By and large the differences between the short stories and the novels are also the differences between the American and British schools of SF. This again helps to limit our field of useful study.

I can’t completely argue against this. They were certainly made. The Twilight Zone and similar shows were out there. It was more open ended I think, speaking to the general human condition rather than any real character growth. We are talking anthologies that maybe keep the same narrator each episode and don’t even appear to happen in the same continuity as each other. We won’t see cornfield boy meeting the guy who broke his glasses after an atomic war or freaky looking people with smooth skin in a world of what we would call the misshapen. Sci-fi with a regular cast seemed to lean toward to heroes responding to events, struggling only for narrative drama and not personal drama. Granted, my exposure to old sci-fi TV is kind of limited. Some of you might have examples to the contrary, and I can’t speak to novels at all.

6. SF writing falls into fairly well—defined genres. At one end is the simple adventure/thriller, with all the terms appropriately translated. Any adult interest here lies in the originality of invention and vitality of writing. On a more adult level this merges into a genre that takes delight in imaginative invention, in pursuing notions to the farthest reaches of speculation. The subtlest exponents here are a group of American writers headed by Ray Bradbury, Kathleen Maclean, Isaac Asimov. In a perhaps crude but often exciting way the apparatus is used to comment on the Big Things — the relation of consciousness to cosmos, the nature of religious belief, and like matters. The American writer Edward B1ish, in “A Case of Conscience”, is surpassing here. More pretentiously, far less ably, the novels of C.S. Lewis likewise use the apparatus of SF in the service of metaphysical ideas. Then comes the large field of what might be called the Threat to Mankind, and Cosmic Disaster.

I couldn’t find a “B1ish” for obvious reasons. Sounds more like a modern internet name or gamertag. The best bet I could get from Google Search was Edward Bryant, writer of the Cities In Distress series and according to Google know for “(h)is innovative style and exploration of societal and philosophical themes in his science fiction”. I’ll have to take their word for it. Isaac Asimov I’m a little better speaking on, but calling him and C.S. Lewis’ writing “crude” (they even called Lewis’ work “pretentious”? You work for British government television!) is weird.

Most of the navels, and most of the British work find their themes here. This is the broad mid—section of SF writing, that best known to the public and more or less identified with SF as such. The best practitioner is John Wyndham. Exploiting instinctive psychic fears, the literature of Threat and Disaster has the most compulsive pull and probably indicates the most likely vein for TV exploitation. All  “Quatermass” and “Andromeda” fall squarely into this genre. Finally, there is a small lively genre of satire, comic or horrific, extrapolating current social trends and techniques. Again, the practitioners are largely American.

Doctor Who apparently went for the sci-fi horror route. That could be why it gets compared to The Quatermass Experiments more than Stingray or Space: 1999. I keep getting the impression that the first two were kind of holdouts for British-produced science fiction. They were dropping the ball hard, weren’t they?

As I was writing this I noticed the word count was heading towards the 3000s so it was time to split this in half to keep this from becoming a boring read. Next time we’ll check out the rest of this first reports and start questioning how this show ever got made.