Doctor Who: 1963 BBC Reports & Notes> Concept Notes For “New SF Drama”

Our previous installments were technically 1962. Now we reach the year 1963, and the BBC hasn’t given up on science fiction even if the last two reports seemed to be trying to talk them out of it. Sydney Newman is now Head Of Drama at the British Broadcasting Company and he’s on board for creating a new science fiction story. We don’t have a name. We don’t even have character names. But we do have a concept!

Creating a television show is a long process of evolving ideas. We saw in the reviews of the Star Trek pitch and writer’s guide how the USS Yorktown under Captain Robert April because the USS Enterprise under James T. Kirk. This is when this series of articles should really start getting good for Doctor Who fans and I’m excited to get to this section finally.

I’ve only skimmed the article so I know they’re setting up the characters they want, but I’ll be going over the specifics as I read them. Return to this article series’ prologue to find out how to download all these notes (so I only have to fix one link if the site I got them from goes down) if you want to read along…though I usually just post the whole thing up anyway in this series. These reports are shorter than most of the guides I’ve reviewed. The first report only needed two articles and the last one just needed the one. How many will I need here? The sooner I get started the lower the odds I’ll need a second one.

BBC ARCHIVE
WRITTEN DOCUMENT 1963

TO: Donald Wilson
FROM: C.E. Webber
29th March 1963

SCIENCE FICTION

Characters and Setup

Envisaged is a “loyalty programme”, lasting at least 52 weeks, consisting of various dramatised S.F. stories, linked to form a continuous serial, using basically a few characters who continue through all the stories. Thus if each story were to run six or seven episodes there would be about eight stories needed to form fifty—two weeks of the overall serial.

Finally got Google AI to explain to the US blogger and comic maker what a “loyalty programme” is: “In the context of British television, a loyalty programme is a marketing strategy used by broadcasters or streaming services to encourage viewers to continue engaging with their content and platform.” One of the examples comes from Sky VIP, which I thought was an airline. The only British TV networks I know are the BBC, ITV, and Sky News. So was Doctor Who a weekday show in the UK? By my count there were 42 episodes of season 1.

Our basic setup with its loyalty characters must fulfil two conditions:—

1. It must attract and hold the audience.
2. It must be adaptable to any S.F. story, so that we do not have to reject stories because they fail to fit into our setup.

Each story arc did have its own flavor while maintaining some rules, at least the classic series. Different writers, different showrunners, and different script editors are going to lead to changes by nature, but the core hadn’t been ruined in the original series, at least as a whole. There will always be a specific arc that stand out for high or low quality.

Suitable characters for the five o’clock Saturday audience.

Child characters do not command the interest of children older than themselves. Young heroines do not command the interest of boys. Young heroes do command the interest of girls. Therefore, the highest coverage amongst children and teenagers is got by:—

THE HANDSOME YOUNG MAN HERO
(First character)

And yet the show was centered around the cranky old man with a space/time ship. I’m assuming they weren’t trying for a “boys show”, but once again the charts don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s interesting that in the US they always try to add some kind of characters kid can relate to and see themselves in, with varying degrees of success. The secret is to make good characters and have a use for kids in your cast beyond “they can see themselves”. Sound familiar? There are kids characters I think are quite good even when I seem to be alone in my assessment. Usually by adults who swear they didn’t like kids when they were kids. I’ve noticed a lot of those general “I hate ALL kid characters” types seem to hate kids NOW and just want everything to be for them. Then again…me being entertained by Paw Patrol, though I haven’t seen it in years even before we dropped cable. I have options. I don’t have time.

A young heroine does not command the full interest of older women; our young hero has already got the boys and girls; therefore we can consider the older woman by providing:—

THE HANDSOME WELLDRESSED HEROINE AGED ABOUT 30
(Second character)

Men are believed to form an important part of the 5 o’clock Saturday (post—Grandstand) audience. They will be interested in the young hero; and to catch them firmly we should add:—

THE MATURER MAN, 35 — 40, WITH SOME “CHARACTER” TWIST.
(Third character)

We almost didn’t get Susan.

Even by looks the First Doctor is hardly “35-40”, and of course he would turn out to be hundreds of years older. Naturally these are Ian, Barbara, and the first Doctor, with Susan not an option because “teen” is considered “kid” to writers. These are notes on how to create a character, and so much of what we know about the Doctor today didn’t exist back then. Even when the show was in production they didn’t agree if the Doctor was from the future or an alien planet. Eventually the alien planet won out.

Nowadays, to satisfy grown women, father—figures are introduced into loyalty programmes at such a rate that TV begins to look like an Old People’s Home: let us introduce them ad hoc, as our stories call for them. We shall have no child protagonists, but child characters may be introduced ad hoc, because story requires it, not to interest children.

[Handwritten note from Sydney Newman: “Need a kid to get into trouble, make mistakes.”]

So if Webber had gotten his way the show would have been about Ian as the rough, tough hero, Barbara as the…older women magnet? Wait, wouldn’t the older women be fawning over the handsome man the same way the older men would drool over the attractive woman? (Leela, anyone?) Also, the Doctor would be…the guy magnet? I’m really not following any of the logic here except for Ian. Even then I’m wondering if they wanted Ian to be Flash Gordon? (Or Captain Starflash, for those of you who get the reference.) Yes, Ian was the “muscle” of the group otherwise consisting of an older woman, a teenage girl, and an old man, but I don’t get how they’re choosing these characters. I guess they got lucky that it worked out.

Points to Sydney for finding a use for a kid character, or we wouldn’t have Susan.

What are our three chosen characters?

The essence of S.F. is that the wonder or fairytale element shall be given a scientific or technical explanation. To do this there must be at least one character capable of giving the explanation, and I think that however we set up our serial, we must come around to at least one scientist as a basic character. I am now suggesting that all three be Scientists, though handsome and attractively normal people. Such vague clichés as Government Project, Secret Research, Industrial Atomics, Privately Financed Laboratory in Scotland, do not necessarily involve our group in every kind of S.F. story presented to us. Therefore I suggest that they are, all three,

Odd place to cut off a sentence given the report’s layout. So the idea of travelling in any kind of space/time vessel, dimensionally transcendental or not, wasn’t even in the picture. Then again, we saw in previous reports they were anti-time travel. Instead they’d do the other cliché and put them in a civilian investigation group.

THE PARTNERS IN A FIRM OF SCIENTIFIC CONSULTANTS.
They are a kind of firm which does not exist at present, being an extension of today’s industrial consultant into the scientific era. We are in a time which is not specified but which is felt to be just a bit ahead of the present; but the wonder is introduced into today’s environment.

The firm carry on normal lines of research in their own small laboratory, or in larger ones elsewhere if the job requires it; this is their bread and butter; but they are always willing to break off to follow some more unusual case. In fact, they have a reputation for tackling problems which no one else could handle; there is almost a feeling of Sherlock Holmes about this side of their work. Our stories are the more unusual cases which come their way.

So nothing like Doctor Who. There are too many of these stories to list, especially as time has gone on. Had they gone this route we would have a completely different show. Even Star Trek wasn’t this far off from the initial sales pitch.

[Handwritten note from Sydney Newman: “But no one here to require being taught.”]

This is actually important. Another way to break through the “as you already know” to inform the audience of what they need to know is to have someone who doesn’t know. It doesn’t even have to be the same character each time, but that’s the goal of a POV character, to ask the questions the audience isn’t there to ask so everyone knows what the characters are rambling on about.

“THE TROUBLESHOOTERS”

Each of them is a specialist in certain fields, so that each can bring a different approach to any problem. But they are all acutely conscious of the social and human implications of any case, and if the two men sometimes become pure scientist and forget, the woman always reminds them that, finally, they are dealing with human beings. Their Headquarters or Base illustrates this dichotomy: it consists of two parts:

1. 1. a small lab fitted with way—out equipment, including some wondrous things acquired in previous investigations and
2. an office for interviews, homely, fusty, comfortable, dustily elegant: it would not have been out of place in Holmes’s Baker street.

So they’d have their own Batcave. The original in the Batman serial even had a desk and filing cabinet. This is something Doctor Who would keep among the original quartet. The Doctor was old and wise, understanding the laws of time and space without Susan’s emotions, though Susan could pitch hit for her grandfather and keep peace between everyone. Ian was the science teacher and could translate at least some of the Doctor or Susan’s comments to Barbara, while she could do the same when it came to history. Ian handled space, Barbara handled time, and the Doctor handled all the sci-fi stuff.

VILLIANS

It would be possible to devise a permanent villain for the above “Troubleshooters” setup. Our heroes find themselves always coming up against him in various cases: the venal politician who seeks to use every situation to increase his own power; or the industrialist always opposing our heroes. Possibly some continuing villain may create himself as we go, but I suggest that we create ad hoc villains for each story, as needed. It is the Western setup in this respect: constant heroes, and a fresh villain each time.

So technically we DID get the show they’re conceptualizing.

I just realized…this is half of the Third Doctor’s run, when the Time Lords trapped him on Earth and he joined UNIT for the resources to try to get out of it. The Doctor is the handsome(ish) hero, the Brigadier is the “maturer man” who is also militaristic (there’s your twist), and the three female Companions he had would be the…well, that should be obvious. AND he had a permanent villain for most of his time even when he started going back into space with either Jo or Sarah Jane: The Master. (Plus, Jo and Sarah Jane were really good about getting into trouble. Especially Sarah since she went to the Lois Lane school of getting a story…and out of her depths as a result.) Sure, the Master would team with other aliens like the Autons but for the most part he was the Doctor’s Moriarty.

Overall Meaning of the Serial.

We shall have no trouble in finding stories. The postulates or S.F., from which its plots derive, can be broadly classified, even enumerated; and we all have additions or startling variations up our sleeves. But I think we might well consider if there is any necessary difference between the dramatic and the literary form, as regards S.F.

Actually, no. As the Star Trek guide showed us the only real differences are settings and gear. Let’s see what they say, as this ends the report.

a. S.F. deliberately avoids character in depth. In S.F. the characters are almost interchangeable. We must use fully conceived characters.

No, in bad writing characters are interchangable. Think Brian Michael Bendis in his New Avengers run. Each character needs to serve a narrative purpose, and to remove that purpose alters the characters into new characters or blank slates nobody will be interested in. If they’re just watching for the action, you did the story wrong, but if you bore the audience you did the action wrong.

b. S.F. is deliberately unsexual; women are not really necessary to it. We must add feminine interest as a consequence of creating real characters.

I know, overused clip, but it so fits. Eye candy in sci-fi was hardly new, especially in Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers newspaper comics. It’s just that silly Hayes Code that made it har…more difficult.

c. Because of the above conditions, S.F. does not consider moral conflict. It has one clear overall meaning: that human beings in general are incapable of controlling the forces they set free. But once we have created real characters, we must consider the implications in terms of those characters in their society. Drama is about moral conflicts: it is about social relationships. Experienced S.F. writers may disagree with me. Well, let them create their own live S.F. drama. but for me, it seems a fine opportunity to write fast-moving, shocking episodes, which necessarily consider, or at least firmly raise, such questions as: ‘What sort of people do we want? What sort of conditions do we desire? What is life? What are we? Can society exist without love, without art, without lies, without sex? Can if afford to continue to exist with politicians? With scientists? And so on.

The Twilight Zone came out in 1959. Your argument is dumb. The only reason sex wasn’t discussed was that US TV was too puritan at the time. Also, not sure the family show with kids watching should be talking about sex in the 1960s. The hippie movement hadn’t started yet, but still no. Also also, shouldn’t that be “what sort of people do we want TO BE?”. It should also be noted that Doctor Who really didn’t tackle any of these in those early years. Mostly you saw it in extended media like the Wilderness years, spinoffs like Torchwood, and occasionally in the main show. Again, people who know nothing about science fiction writing about science fiction. The Star Trek writer’s guide couldn’t come out soon enough and the parts about how to make good sci-fi should still be distributed to everyone!

Next time we finally get to learn about a show called Doctor Who and our favorite Companions: Cliff, Lola, and Biddy. Everyone loves Biddy, right? Get read for a loooooot of notes from Sydney Newman on the next one.