Doctor Who 1963 BBC Reports & Notes> Audience Report & Final Thoughts

Our final report of this series is rather short, so I might as well end with this article. Thus far we’ve looked at reports leading up to the creation of Doctor Who and it’s pilot episode “An Unearthly Child”, a pilot so off the mark they had to redo the whole thing despite mostly keeping the same script. The final pilot aired on November 23rd, 1963, with the remainder of the storyline called “100,000 BC”, where the next three episodes took place. However, we all know it by the first episode’s name: An Unearthly Child. This was before the serials used multipart titles. Based on later naming systems the episode would have been called “100,000 BC part 1” or “An Unearthly Child part 1” despite the former more properly representing the storyline. Alternately “An Unearthly Child” should have been a stand-alone (a rarity in classic Who) and the others three episodes be “100,000 BC” parts one to three.

The report was actually filed on December 30th according to the TARDIS Fandom wiki, which is more than a month after the pilot aired. This isn’t a report on the whole arc, just the first episode. One would think for the first episode of a series you’re committing to, especially one that practically had to force itself into existing given everything we’ve seen in this series of reports. Instead it’s just a report for “An Unearthly Child”. I don’t know if this was just for this show or the entirety of BBC programming that night. The report is titled “British Broadcasting Corporation Confidential AN AUDIENCE RESEARCH REPORT (Week 48) [File number] VR/63/668”. So this could just be a snippet of a larger report. Still, it’s the only part we care about, which may be why they included it in the list.

For one last time (and because these pingback links help find the articles in the proper order), find the link to download all of these from the prologue and let’s wrap this series up.

‘DR. WHO’
1: An Unearthly Child

Designer: Peter Brachacki
Produced by Verity Lambert
Directed by Waris Hussein

Saturday, 23rd November, 1963.
5.15—5.40 pm, Television Service

1. Size of audience (based on results of the Survey of Listening and Viewing.)

It is estimated that the audience was 9%. Programmes on ITV at the time were seen by 8%.

9%? Only nine percent of the countries that make up the United Kingdom, which the BBC airs as a TV tax, watched the show? I don’t know how many people that is, but that sounds like a darn low number. Sadly we don’t have one of these for the reairing, which is usually praised as pushing the show. TARDIS wiki places the count at 4.4 million viewers, with the replay coming in at 6.0 million despite not airing on BBC One in Northern Ireland. The repeat was, as often told, because there was still discussion surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jr, with Lee Harvey Oswald killed the day after the first airing. The wiki also says the episode was a few minutes late, not because of the assassination reporting but because the show before it, Grandstand, ran over by a couple of minutes.

2. Reaction of audience (based on questionnaires completed by a sample of the audience. This sample, 124 in number, is the 12% of the Viewing Panel who saw the broadcast.)

In the same vein, 124 people seems like a rather small sample. I wonder how many people Nielsen was working with in America at the time?

The reactions of this sample of the audience were distributed as follows:—

A+ 17%
A 39%
B 31%
C 6%
C— 7%

giving a REACTION INDEX of 63, close to the current averages for television drama (62) and children’s programmes (64).

At least it got good marks. Good on you for studying! Next comes some kind of review. The report doesn’t say who it’s from or if it’s a collection of reviews, but we’re going to break this down.

3. ‘Tonight’s new serial seemed to be a cross between Wells’ Time Machine and a space—age Old Curiosity Shop, with a touch of Mack Sennett comedy. It was in the grand style of the old pre—talkie films to see a dear old Police Box being hurtled through space and landing on Mars or somewhere. I almost expected to see a batch of Keystone Cops emerge on to the Martian landscape.

Yes. I don’t have Keystone cops, so this is the best I can do. Let him. 

That actually could have been cool. Keystone cops in space. Hmm. Too bad that never happened. I wonder what the reviewer would have thought if they had opted to change shape at the end? Or if they went with the original invisible ship idea? I don’t know if I’m breaking this up right because #3 is one large paragraph. There might have been formatting issues with the file or with the original report. I’ve already been fixing spellings in this series.

Anyway, it was all good, clean fun and I look forward to meeting the nice Doctor’s planetary friends next Saturday, whether it be in the ninth or ninety—ninth century A.D.’ wrote a retired Naval Officer speaking, it would seem, for a good many viewers in the sample who regarded this as an enjoyable piece of escapism, not to be taken too seriously, of course, but none the less entertaining and, at times, quite thrilling — ‘taken as fantasy it was moat enjoyable.

I try to avoid long sentences like this. Usually I succeed. I wonder if these people were disappointed when the next episode brought cavemen instead of Martians? They’d have to wait a long time for the Martians, when we were finally introduced to the Ice Warriors.

I presume it is meant for the kiddies but nevertheless I found it entertaining at Saturday teatime and look forward to seeing the Cave of Skulls in the next episode’. Some viewers disliked the play, either because they had a blind spot for science fiction of any kind or because they considered this a rather poor example, being altogether too far—fetched and ludicrous, particularly at the end — ‘a police box with flashing beacon travelling through interstellar space — what claptrap!’ Too childish for adults, it was at the same time occasionally felt to be unsuitable for children of a more timid disposition and, for one reason or another, proved something of a disappointment to a sizeable number of those reporting.

Actually, it travelled through time. Interstellar space was the next story. Sounds like they believed it as much as Ian. Classic Doctor Who had a lot of fights with parent groups coming, notoriously Mary Whitehouse, founder of the former National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (now called Mediawatch-UK) insisting the show was bad for children. I guess that started early. It’s kind of funny given how many adults grew up with Doctor Who and how far the relaunched show had drifted from children even before Disney+ took it over.

Generally speaking, however, viewers in the sample thought this a good start to a series which gave promise of being very entertaining — the children, they were sure, would love it (indeed, there is every evidence that children viewing with adults in the sample found it very much to their taste) but it was, at the same time, written imaginatively enough to appeal to adult minds and would, no doubt, prove to be quite intriguing as it progressed.

I guess it did. The show would go on to become a cultural icon of British television and one of their biggest exports to the US. And then they ruined it like every other cultural icon of geek and pop culture that dared to extend to regular culture without satisfying the everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee crowd and their extremist activist subfaction.

4. The acting throughout was considered satisfactory, several viewers adding that it was pleasant to see William Hartnell again in the somewhat unusual role (for him) of Dr. Who, while the radiophonio effects were apparently highly successful in creating the appropriate ‘out of this world’ atmosphere, the journey through space being particularly well done.

Copyright Audience Research Department of the BBC
30th December, 1963.

Again I wonder if anyone was disappointed they only ended up in caveman days, having to wait for Skarro and the space part of the travels? Now it feels like (whatever the numbers say) they spend most of their time in present day London, with no attempt to explain the timeline of where Earth was in the original show. I guess when 10 stopped Harriet Jones from becoming three time prime minister and initiator of Britain’s Golden Age in a fit of anger. And you wonder why I have issues with “the God Doctor”? He wasn’t even the “Time Lord Victorious” at the time. He had just regenerated.

So what have we learned during this series of articles? On the technical side we saw a show form from a base idea to something that barely resembled it (though funnily would revisit some of those ideas during the time the Doctor worked with UNIT). We’ve seen early character ideas change into the four characters that brought a franchise to life and international success even if none of them stayed around the entire time. Carole Ann Ford left the following season, but returns as Susan in crossover stories and Big Finish productions. Susan is the only family member of the Doctor’s we have ever met in official canon outside of theories about his mom. Playing 15 at 23, she’s older than many of the surviving Doctors.

William Russell and Jacqueline Hill left the show together the season after. His brief return as Ian, running a sort of Companion support group in “The Power Of The Doctor” at 93 made him the Guiness World Record holder for longest time between returning to a role, though previous attempts to bring him back had met with blockades. Hill would come back before cancer took her in 1991, but not as Barbara. She played Lexa, the priestess, in “Megalos” alongside the Fourth Doctor. The girls are the only ones to have worked with a current Doctor, though Barbara’s appearance in the 15th Doctor’s story was…nonsensical.

William Hartnell left the following year due to health issues, his last appearance being in a monitor since he couldn’t physically perform with his two replacements in “The Three Doctors”. Two other actors on TV kept the original Doctor active in crossover moments, one of them even playing Hartnell in the docudrama An Adventure In Space And Time. His departure required the creation of a process later dubbed “regeneration”, where the Doctor could replaced by a new actor, each bringing something different to the role.

The other thing that really struck me about this show besides all the changes to characters from the idea of a bunch of people investigating mysteries to space/time travellers was how it seemed to push back against the attempts to keep the show from ever happening, and then happening as the show we know today. First it was “don’t make a sci-fi show”, then it was “don’t make it about time travel and non-human looking aliens”, then it was invisible craft that fit in a van and four people working out of a laboratory. Somehow we reached the Doctor Who we know and love. By now I’m so used to upper crust media snobs in the right positions trying to stop science fiction or fantasy from existing, or at least being anything other than social commentary or the human spirit or whatever. Sometimes you just want to see a bad guy tossed into a time tunnel and end up becoming the Loch Ness Monster. Some of the worst episodes in the classic series had some kind of message or spoke out of the anger of the writer against someone on the opposite end of politics. Those stories were terrible and sadly this is the direction the new show has gone, but let’s forget about that for now.

Doctor Who has fought it’s whole classic existence to…well, exist. I thought it was just parent groups and programmers who put their own tastes above the show, but from the start it had to fight to become the show we know. Science fiction and fantasy have a large following but there’s always some sad sack, upper crust media snob looking down on it and deciding only their tastes matter. We almost didn’t get Star Wars and the success of that movie is what allowed science fiction to finally earn a spot in media outside of “action kids fluff”. Fantasy could have had that with the Lord Of The Rings movie trilogy or Harry Potter films, had our current culture not brought in a new class of media snobs fueled by sociopolitical anger and self-important “only my tastes matter” brats instead of a desire to continue these stories that had become a sort of stand-in mythology for so many.

When our friend first told us about this show about a guy in a blue box from England, our local PBS station aired it at our suppertime, so I didn’t get to see it until I was able to record it or someone changed the airtimes. When I was finally able to watch it, I really liked it. Here was a man and his friends working to make the universe a better place. I hate that New Who started with the notion that wherever the Doctor goes, death follows, because it’s wrong. Death got their first and the Doctor shows up to save as many people as possible. Though caused by budget and circumstance, the ship that brings a mysterious hero to save the day is a box meant for enforcing the law, just as the Doctor enforces the laws of time and space as well as morality. I do agree that the wheezing sound of the old TARDIS tearing through the spacetime vortex has become a symbol of hope. When the Doctor comes, you have a chance, written right there on the door.

• Police Telephone–calling a hero when the times are darkest
• Free for Use of Public–here to save everyone, not just the “important” because everyone is important regardless of social status
• Advice and Assistance Obtainable Immediately–okay, he might be a bit late, but if he doesn’t save you, he will avenge you
• Officers and Cars Respond to Urgent Calls–a hero there when we need him
• Pull to Open–how many of us wanted to open that door and find the magical ship were we would be safe and blast off to some adventure out in the cosmos of history

They may not have planned for that, but fate, like the TARDIS, tends to have its own ideas. Though the snobs eventually won the battle, this franchise continued through audio dramas, comics, novels, and fan productions. (I made a few fancomics of my own.) They even considered bringing it back as a web cartoon until it was finally brought back to television, for better or for worse. There’s a reason a strange man in his blue box survived so many decades, was homaged in so many ways over the years, and kept a strong fanbase despite being off the air. Our world would be a bit worse off without the Doctor and his adventures. Despite what’s been done to him lately, I’m glad I live in the timeline where someone in the right positions of the BBC fought for a new science fiction show, did everything they could to make it as good as possible, and won.

It’s interesting to see what could have been, if only to appreciate what we have, to see how story ideas evolve, and what happens when you fight for what you want to make, knowing when to accept change and when to stick to it. Sometimes it’s fate that decides if you succeed or fail. If you have an idea, fight for it, evolve it, work with it, make something special, and you may be surprised by the end result. I hope I get to review an actual writer’s guide for any of the seasons of Doctor Who but this was fun. Curious what our next story bible will be for.