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.
