An Unearthly Series - The Origins of a TV Legend

The twenty-ninth in our series of features telling the story of the creation of Doctor Who, and the people who made it happen.

By the middle of November, the show's opening serial had been recorded, and production was proceeding on the second - The Daleks, by Terry Nation.

On Saturday 16th November 1963, exactly fifty years ago today, the British public had their first glimpse of Doctor Who, when the first trailer for the new series was broadcast on BBC Television.

The trailer was shown at 5.40pm, sandwiched between an episode of the cartoon series Deputy Dawg, in which he tries to sell his vintage fire engine, and an episode of The Telegoons, the puppet show version of the radio's The Goon Show. The Doctor Who trailer no longer exists, but the script survives in the BBC archives.
As well as the television promo a radio version was also transmitted in the week before the series' debut. The BBC Publicity team was briefed about the show, with producer Verity Lambert putting out a rewritten memo based on the one issued by Donald Wilson back in July. Reflecting the unease about the series in the higher echelons of the BBC, the memo no longer talked about a programme running for 52 weeks, but just listed the titles of the first three stories. Lambert made a plea for the team to protect spoilers in the series.
Although thirteen episodes were now confirmed and a transmission date was fast approaching, the production team were still having to cope with a number of problems and an inherent resistance to the show from within the BBC. James Mudie, the Head of Scenic Servicing for Television, had been against the idea from the start, worried that late scripts and impossible demands would put undue pressure on his department and jeopardise other productions. In July, he had warned the management to "think twice about proceeding with a weekly series of this nature."

Things came to a head in early November when the Controller of Programme Services, Ian Atkins, decided that the spaceship set was too heavy and cumbersome and needed to be simplified. It was taking too long to be rigged in the studio whenever it was needed, and would have to be redesigned. Mudie jumped on this memo and asked Head of Design J Beynon-Lewis and the designer of the current story in production, Raymond Cusick, to proceed with this as a matter of urgency: "in its present form it is obstructing the night setting operations for the whole of the Television Service."

Cusick informed Lambert of the instructions for the redesign he had been given. Although she had no strong objection, she was adamant that the costs for the redesign should not come from Doctor Who's budget but should be paid for by the design department, as the fault lay with original designer Peter Brachacki. Lambert was not happy that she had been bypassed in the decision process and not included in the memo to Cusick. She complained to her superior, Wilson: "No copy of Mr Mudie's memo was sent to me and instructions were issued to the designer without reference to me, in spite of the fact that no provision of man hours or money has been made for this by anybody up to the present time."

On Friday 15th November the first episode of The Dead Planet was recorded at Lime Grove Studio D, although the following week it would be discovered that the episode was not quite as ready for transmission as had been thought . . .

Throughout the problems, one man remained buoyant, fully behind the series and its untried production team. On Friday 15th November Head of Television Drama Sydney Newman sent Wilson the following memo.