The Doctor Who radio pilot of 1966
In 1989, an article in The Frame fanzine drew fandom’s attention to the hitherto unknown attempts to launch a Doctor Who radio series staring Peter Cushing in the 1960s. Little information was available and it wasn’t clear how far the attempt had got, only that it had failed. Andrew Pixley dug out further information from the BBC archives for Doctor Who Magazine in 2004. The most significant of Pixley’s revelations was that the pilot had actually been recorded. Then, after extensive research, Richard Bignell filled in the gaps and reproduced the pilot script in issue 3 of his fanzine Nothing at the End of the Lane in 2012.
This article will give a brief review of the pilot script and note its interesting points of adherence to, and deviation, from the mythos and storylines of the television series and the Cushing films. It’s not my intention to give a full account of the life of the project (you should see Nothing at the End of the Lane for that) but a bit of background is required to put the script into context.
Following their initial approach to the BBC in 1965, Watermill (later Stanmark) Productions were granted an option on a Doctor Who radio series in 1966. Their intention was to produce a series for sale to the commercial broadcasters in countries where the television series was screened (presumably only the English-speaking ones) but they also hoped they may be able to sell it back to the BBC for transmission in the UK. The BBC withheld their share of the rights to the Daleks from the deal, feeling the Daleks were not a suitable radio property.
By mid-1966 the pilot script, titled Journey Into Time, had been written. The writer was Malcolm Hulke. Although he had come close to providing a story in the early days of the series, he’d not yet written for television Doctor Who. He would do so soon, co-writing The Faceless Ones the following year.
Stanmark hoped to hire Boris Karloff to play Dr Who – as the lead was called, as in the comics and films (if not, arguably, in the television series) – but he was unavailable. They also failed secure their second choice, Robert Coote. Given that they were recording in July 1966, with the Dr Who and the Daleks film only a year old and its sequel premiering the same month, it’s amazing that Peter Cushing was only third choice, particularly given that the radio Dr Who and Susan and more analogous to their big screen counterparts than to any other versions. Cushing accepted and the pilot recording went ahead. The other cast members are unknown.
The pilot script is like a strange amalgam of An Unearthly Child, the Cushing films and a TV Comic strip, with possibly a hint of the new introduction to the series from David Whitaker’s 1964 novelisation Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. The plot very broadly follows that of An Unearthly Child, in a much simplified form, but swaps Ian and Barbara for Susan’s school friend Mike and starts the narrative at an earlier point.
Whereas An Unearthly Child begins with the Doctor and Susan already established in London, Hulke’s script opens with their arrival. Significantly, therefore, there is no mystery for the listener about the nature of Susan and her grandfather, nor any audience identification characters through whom they are initially encountered. Perhaps these were considered irrelevancies in the assumption that the audience was already familiar with the main concepts of the series from television, although that also assumes the radio series would not sell on its own merits to countries that hadn’t previously screened the TV series.
They land not in a junkyard but on a common and learn from a newspaper that it is England in 1967. They are three thousand years off course, thanks to a faulty ‘telechronometer’. It’s later explained that they had aimed to see the pyramids being built but ended up surrounded by dinosaurs and have since visited many times and places in the attempt to get home. Although it doesn’t explicitly state that they are human, that is clearly Hulke’s intention as it’s later specified that they come from Earth, albeit from about three thousand years into the future.
After Dr Who and Susan leave TARDIS (as in the films, there’s no “the”), they observe its metamorphosis into the shape of a police box, which Dr Who recognises from museums in his own time. Later, he names the component responsible as the “E.C.S. – electronic chameleon system”. He goes on to explain how the ship’s “long range television lenses search the surrounding terrain for an object – a house, a ship, a hut – then TARDIS automatically re-assembles to look like that object.” Hulke’s use of the chameleon metaphor is ahead of its time: on television, the chameleon circuit is not named until 1980’s Logopolis, although Terrance Dicks’ Terror of the Autons novelisation from 1975 refers to the “chameleon mechanism” and “chameleon circuits”.
In a greater departure from the television terminology, Hulke redefines the derivation of the TARDIS acronym, rendering the Dimension/Dimensions debate an irrelevance. TARDIS is defined as (brace yourselves): Time and Relative Dimensional Interplanetary Ship. It’s no sillier than the TV version but it seems an oddly unnecessary change to make. In another divergence from the television series, this Dr Who built TARDIS himself, as Cushing’s character had in the films. Reassuringly, however, it’s familiar old mercury required to put the telechronometer right. This, and the frequent references to a food machine, give the script the feel of a David Whitaker storyline.
Seemingly on a whim, Susan decides she wants to go to school in 1967 while Dr Who sets about his repairs. Soon she’s impressing a teacher with her detailed knowledge of binary (which she uses to programme the dinner computer!) but causes bemusement with an anachronistic reference to the Antarctic city of Zenophon. Presumably referencing Britain’s pre-decimal currency (as in An Unearthly Child) was considered potentially unhelpful to overseas listeners who themselves may be unfamiliar with it.
Susan is saved from the school bully by classmate Mike Logan, who befriends her. When he takes Susan home for Sunday dinner with his parents she is able to name all the plants in their greenhouse but also refers to having seen plants grown large and dangerous following an atomic explosion. She could do with a chameleon device of her own to help her fit in.
Mike’s father is a police officer, a clear device for handy exposition: Mr Logan can recognise the police box on the common as an inexplicable new arrival, while Mike describes the appearance and normal contents of a police box. Without this, the miraculous bigger-inside-than-out properties of TARDIS might well have been lost on any listeners not already familiar with the TV series, although as noted above it is unclear that there was much expectation of an audience coming to the series without knowledge of the television version. As in An Unearthly Child, the box emits a “vibrating hum” and seems to be ‘alive’.
Later, Mike walks Susan home. Passing near TARDIS, Mike meets Dr Who, who, unlike the Cushing film version, is very rude to him. On another occasion when Mike thinks he sees Susan slip inside the police box (and the light flash as she does so, in an odd bit of deviation from the television precedent, particularly given the medium), Mike goes back to the box and again encounters Rude Dr Who. As with Ian and Barbara in An Unearthly Child, Dr Who tries to get rid of Mike but when he hears Susan calling from within (that her grandfather’s dinner has been served by the computer), he forces his way into TARDIS.
Hulke establishes the weirdness of the TARDIS interior well, specifying that Mike’s footsteps on the metal floor echo in a “hall-like” place filled with “electronic humming and whirring sounds”. “It’s like a great electronic palace”, Mike exclaims, “it’s so large.” Later, Hulke specifies: “huge metallic doors close with a final resounding clang”, suggesting a rather different soundscape for the ship’s interior than on television. However, this was likely not entirely the case in the pilot recording as Bignell reports that the BBC provided Stanmark with tapes of TARDIS sound effects, including the doors, scanner, background hum and materialisation.
Surprisingly, upon Mike’s intrusion, Dr Who quickly softens to him, proudly giving him a brief introduction to the main components of the ship, the requirement for exposition being no respecter of naturalistic character development. Oddly, this TARDIS is somewhat smaller than even the TV version, which seems a waste of the opportunities radio provides for vistas unlimited by budgetary constraints. The ship’s interior is little more than the control room, with couches for sleeping folding out from the wall and showers hidden behind a mere partition. More impressive is the scanner’s “infra-red penetration”, which is a lot more advanced than anything Hartnell had (his didn’t even have colour).
Although initially a grumpy old so-and-so, this Dr Who is not quite as hostile to his intruder as the Hartnell version in An Unearthly Child. There’s no electrifying the console, ranting or kidnapping, and it’s thanks to Mike’s flick of a switch that TARDIS dematerialises. It’s not clear how deliberate a move this is; it could have been played as a careless bungle in the recording, much as it is in the first Cushing film, but as Mike’s only just been told what the switch does when he touches it, it seems just as likely to be deliberate. Amusingly, as the ship lurches into motion, Dr Who insists they all get onto the couches and fasten their safety belts – something not seen on television until Timelash in 1985.
TARDIS land in what appears a desolate landscape but it transpires it’s arrived amidst during the American revolution, established by the unsubtle use of American accents making references to Boston and opposing King George’s soldiers. Just then Dr Who, Susan and Mike find themselves – gasp! – surrounded by soldiers about to shoot. Cue Doctor Who’s first radio cliffhanger. It lacks all the weirdness, ambiguity and mystery of An Unearthly Child’s essentially visual cliffhanger, but such subtlety was clearly not possible on radio, nor probably desirable in such a brash new version of the series.
Although Journey Into Time found favour with some within the BBC, it was ultimately not considered suitable for the Corporation to broadcast themselves, with dismissive comments from the heads of sound drama and the Light Programme (the only BBC radio station to which it might have been suited). The former, Martin Esslin, noted that “as a typical commercial production of [sic] unsophisticated listeners in Australia or even some parts of the United States, it stands up quite well”, but found it “extremely feeble” as science fiction and not a programme he could support. The latter noted, amongst other observations, that it would be “difficult” to have two different versions of the series, with two different leads, playing simultaneously in Britain. A re-edited (to remove the frequent advert breaks) and re-submitted version of the pilot failed to change the BBC’s stance in early 1967.
All went quiet from Stanmark Productions and eventually their option on the series expired in 1968. In a contribution to Bignell’s article, Richard Bates, joint head of Stanmark, suggested that responses from international distributors had been discouraging. It was a sad end to an endeavour which could have led to a second long-running broadcast version of Doctor Who. Stanmark Productions itself folded in 1972 resulting in the destruction of its archive of recordings, including the Journey Into Time pilot. No copies are known to survive.
In many ways the radio pilot is the ultimate lost episode: fully completed but never broadcast. However, since the script was published, three different recordings of the pilot have been made by groups of fans. You can find them here, here, and here.
It’s tempting to ponder how the radio series would have developed if it had prospered. Would it have stuck with new scripts or resorted to adaptations of television adventures? Might any monsters or characters from the TV parent have crossed over? Would it have embraced regeneration or found its own solution to cast changes? We can but wonder…
Main Sources
Richard Bignell’s article on the radio pilot (and reproduction of the script) in issue 3 of his fanzine Nothing at the End of the Lane. Buy your copy here.
David J Howe’s brief article about the pilot in issue 10 of The Frame in 1989.
Andrew Pixley’s ‘Archive Extra’ feature in Doctor Who Magazine issue 349 in 2004.
This is an updated version of an article originally published in Plaything of Sutekh issue 2 from 2012, edited by John Connors and Richard Farrell. Visit John’s website here.