Russell Davies says that he wants to write a darker LGBTQ+ drama as he feels there is 'a lot of hatred in the air.' And, he's not wrong. Speaking at the Iris Prize, the largest LGBTQ+ short film prize in the world, the writer and producer said that he was worried about 'where we are now.' Big Rusty said that his writing always came back to the 'here and now. I have things to say about that,' he added. Davies, who recently took charge of Doctor Who again after helping to revive it in 2005, said he thought his work would always relate to the modern day. 'I might write historical stuff like A Very English Scandal, or futuristic stuff like Doctor Who, but if you look at my work, it always comes back to the here and now,' he said. 'I think I have done two big pieces, which are Queer As Folk set in 1999 and looked at the world then. And then there was Cucumber, set in 2015,' Davies said. 'I think as I'm getting older now, slowing down, towards the end of my life, I would love to write a third piece that says where we are now. I worry about where we are and I think there's a lot of hatred in the air, a lot of nonsense in the air, a lot of rhetoric, and a lot of hate-makers stoking up the fires and I have things to say about that, so I'd be surprised if I don't say something about that.' He said representation was important. 'We need to constantly work to keep LGBTQ+ representation at the heart of the narrative. It's dangerous to think it's alright. There's still more that needs to be done.' Davies, whose work also includes Years & Years and It's A Sin, said it was important to keep a taste of today. 'It's very easy to sit in your office, especially as you get older and become divorced from the world and settle into things and suddenly you're writing things that could've been written ten or twenty years ago,' he said. 'One of the plus sides of gay rights and queer rights being on the news is it keeps me on my toes. I wish we didn't have half the problems or any of the problems, but actually when you're constantly the headline, when politicians constantly talk about you, when the media is constantly talking about you, at least you're on top of things, and kind of aware of the arguments.'
Doctor Who executive Jane Tranter has given an update on how many episodes have been shot for the upcoming season of Doctor Who. Which everyone knew anyway - twelve - so, this isn't really an 'exclusive' as you claimed in your rather clickbait headline, Radio Times is it? Sorry, do you have any adults in the building we can speak to? Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, Jane revealed her biggest achievement in the past year and sang the praises of Doctor Who's cast and crew who have made it all possible. Filming for the new series officially began in December 2022, with Ncuti Gatwa set to take over full-time following the the sixtieth anniversary specials, which will be broadcast in November (although we still don't know exactly when in November at this time). She revealed when asked about what she is most proud of from the past twelve months: 'Getting the new Doctor Who [series] up and running; shooting twelve episodes, fast and furious, thanks to the speed at which Russell T Davies works!' Jane added the crew have been able to 'move forward into production of season two within twelve months of starting season one,' all while working on various other programmes.
Now, dear blog reader, to the really big Doctor Who news of the week. One to which this latest bloggiersationisms title is, for once, appropriate. It's from Marx in case you were wondering. Groucho, probably. In the last From The North bloggerisationisms update, this blogger wrote about the BBC's announcement of plans, from 1 November, to put the entirety of Doctor Who's existent episode catalogue up on iPlayer to give those of us in the UK unlimited access to the history of the popular long running family SF drama. Sadly, however, those plans have, seemingly, fallen at the first fence and four episodes of Doctor Who will not be present (at least, initially). Four pretty important episodes, at that. You've probably heard about it - here, for example. Or, here. Or, here. If you haven't heard, then allow this blogger to direct you to From The North favourite The Confused Adipose on You Tube. Where Mister Adipose (this blogger is still pretty certain that's not his real name) gives a very precise, impressively balanced and thoughtful analysis on the sorry situation. Or, for a somewhat more 'forthright' take on the matter, try this one, from Tharries. Or this one, from Mister TARDIS. Or this one, from Richard Lloyd. The latter with, it must be noted, a rather hysterically clickbait title. 'Lost forever'? Did Mister Coburn gain access to the BBC's archives overnight and wipe every last copy? You're waiting for this blogger's thoughts on the matter, yes? Like Mister Adipose, Keith Telly Topping intends not to editorialise about this and simply let the BBC's lawyers work on trying to resolve the situation in a bit of peace and quiet. This blogger will merely observe - he believes uncontroversially - that, from the evidence of some of the things he has been saying on social media both recently and more historically, Mister Coburn does appear to be a rather unpleasant individual. As if we haven't got enough of those in the world already.
However, one of the side-issues of this rather sorry tale of bitterness, questions of authorship and 'vengeance' (the latter word, his rather than anyone else's, please note), was Mister Coburn's use of The Tribe Of Gum as a title for the four episodes which constitutes Doctor Who's serial A. This title has been around for many years and, appears to be what Anthony Coburn's initial scripts for the four episodes (An Unearthly Child, The Cave Of Skulls, The Forest Of Fear and The Firemaker) was called. It was used, in 1988 for example, as the title of the script book, a verbatim transcript of the broadcast version of the serial, edited by John McElroy and published by Titan Books. However, it is not used in many other places and, just to take one other example, if you check out the Wikipedia page for serial A, it isn't mentioned at all. Of course, technically, one can argue - and, indeed, this blogger has done in the past, most notably in The Guinness Book Of Classic British TV (1996 edition) - that serial A is actually two completely separate stories; the opening pilot episode, set in 1963 and then a three-parter set at the Dawn of Time. But let's not be pedantic, we have more important things to worry about. Like whether the serial will ever be seen in public again. Except on all of those many thousands of videos and DVDs that the BBC have sold over the years, obviously. This blogger has several of them himself. Firstly, however, a brief history of time ...
In December 1962, BBC Television's then Controller of Programmes, Donald Baverstock informed the corporations new Head of Drama, Sydney Newman (recently arrived from ABC where he had co-created The Avengers) of a gap in the schedule on Saturday evenings between Grandstand and Juke Box Jury which needed attention. Baverstock believed that a new programme should appeal to three audiences: children who had previously been accustomed to viewing television during that timeslot, the predominantly teenage audience which the popular Juke Box Jury attracted and the adult sports-fan audience of Grandstand. Newman, as detailed in David Howe, Mark Stammers & Stephen James Walker's Doctor Who The Handbook: The First Doctor - The William Hartnell Years 1963-1966 (Virgin Books, 1994), decided that a nominally educational science-fiction drama should fill the gap. Thus fulfilling two-thirds of the BBC's Reithian public service broadcasting commitment to 'inform, educate and entertain.' He initially offered the role of the producer on the project, first known merely as The Saturday Serial and then, as Doctor Who, to the heavyweight BBC staff producer Don Taylor (1936-2003), most noted for his collaborations with playwright David Mercer. Taylor, as detailed in his autobiography, Days Of Vision: David Mercer & Television Drama In The Sixties (Methuen Publishing Ltd, 1990), turned Newman down flat ('that, as they say, was an opportunity missed'). Taylor was, it must be noted, something of a snob and was displeased by the arrival of Newman at the BBC. He regarded Newman as an 'uncultured populist' with no theatrical knowledge or background; Taylor himself felt that the BBC should be the 'National Theatre Of The Air.' So, Doctor Who, it appears, had one Hell of lucky escape in that regard. As to who 'created' Doctor Who, the title and the concept of an old man with a time machine that he couldn't control properly wandering through the fourth dimension, appear to have been Newman's from the outset (although Donald Wilson also claimed, in 1971, to have devised the title). Newman then handed these ideas to others within the BBC's drama (series & serials) department for development. Donald Wilson, the head of the script department and the writer Bunny Webber contributed heavily to the formatting of the programme and co-wrote Doctor Who's first format document with Newman circa April 1963; Newman, it is suggested, also conceived of the idea of a time machine which was larger on the inside than the outside. Production was initiated in the summer of 1963 and headed by Newman's protégé, Verity Lambert - one of, if not the, first female producer at the BBC - and story editor David Whitaker to oversee, after a brief period when the show had been handled by a caretaker producer, Rex Tucker. Webber is said to have submitted a Doctor Who pilot entitled Nothing At The End Of The Lane, in May 1963. The story would feature The Doctor, a schoolgirl called Biddy and her teachers, Lola and Cliff. In the event, Webber never ended up writing for the show and left the production during the summer to work on Thorndyke. But, some elements from his treatment did end up, uncredited, in the opening episode, An Unearthly Child. The credited author for that episode and the three which follow was Anthony Coburn. An Australian, Coburn emigrated to the UK in the 1950s and joined the BBC as a staff writer. He liaised closely with the series' story editor, David Whitaker, on establishing the characters of the show. It is believed to have been Coburn's idea for The Doctor's travelling companion, now renamed Suzanne, then Susan, to be his granddaughter, as he was disturbed by the possible sexual connotations of an old man travelling with an unrelated teenager. In a memo to Lambert (undated, but probably from around July or August), Whitaker referred to a rewrite that Coburn had been asked to carry out. 'Tony has improved episode one very much - particularly regarding [Ian] Chesterton. I have discussed the whole business with him and we have agreed he shall push on and finish all four scripts. Tony has inserted some details about Suzanne regarding her own existence. Doctor Who, as you will read, tells that (or hints that) Suzanne has some sort of Royal Blood. This gives Doctor Who and Suzanne good reason to leave their own environment. Of course I think we must discuss this carefully with Tony when we go through the scripts with him.' Whether Coburn was the person who had the idea that the time machine should be disguised as a police telephone box, as his son claims, is unknown, but it is more than likely. As to who came up with the name 'TARDIS' (and what it is an acronym for), again Coburn's son claims this was his father's idea whilst Doctor Who's first director, Waris Hussain, insists that was entirely Verity Lambert's creation. On this, as with so many early decisions taken by the production team, where documentary evidence is scant or absent, we'll never know of certain. Anthony Coburn left the production around October 1963 having written a couple of further proposed story ideas (neither of which were produced although one, The Masters Of Luxor, has been published in script form). He remained a BBC employee, creating Warship and working on The Onedin Line. He died in 1977 when producing Poldark.
Anyway, back - for the first of several times - to this The Tribe Of Gum malarkey. When the news first broke concerning what was going on in relation to the BBC's inability to clear one of their own programmes for iPlayer, this blogger's Facebook fiend, JR Southall posted a link to it, noting, with some amusement, the use of The Tribe Of Gum as the story's overall title. Because, that's never been a title which has had too many supporters. Again, to briefly summarise a very complex situation, Doctor Who is a series of serials - ie. it's a drama series made up of stories which are told in between one and fourteen episodes. However, between 1963 and 1966, each individual episode of the series had its own title. It was only in June 1966, with the twenty sixth Doctor Who serial, The Savages, that individual episodes were given an overall story title followed by 'episode one', 'episode two', et cetera. Thus, as previously noted, the four episodes which constitute serial A have no overall on-screen title. This didn't become an issue until 1972 when Piccolo Books published The Making Of Doctor Who, written by the series then script editor Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. In that, the authors listed and gave brief plot synopses for all of the Doctor Who stories to date (this book, incidentally, is where Terrance's frequently quoted 'mission statement' that The Doctor is 'never cruel or cowardly' first saw print). In this, for overall story titles, Terry and Mac simply used the BBC records they had to hand and, thus, for the first twenty five Doctor Who stories, they simply used the title of the first episode of each serial. So, serial A was An Unearthly Child, serial B The Dead Planet, serial C The Edge Of Destruction, serial D A Journey To Cathay, serial E The Sea Of Death and so on. Subsequent references works on Doctor Who - Jean-Marc Lofficier's 1981 The Doctor Who Programme Guide, Ian Levine's contribution to the Radio Times Doctor Who Twentieth Anniversary Special (1983) and Peter Haining's Doctor Who: A Celebration (also 1983) all used a different set of titles. Serial A was still An Unearthly Child, but serial B was The Daleks, serial C remained The Edge Of Destruction, serial D became Marco Polo, followed by The Keys Of Marinus, The Aztecs, The Sensorites and so on until 1966's The Gunfighters (serial Z) the last Doctor Who serial to feature individual episode titles. The BBC (and, to a lesser extent, Target Books publishers of the popular Doctor Who novelisations) seemed happy enough with these titles as reflected by various 'official' and/or licensed releases of these stories either as novels or, later, videos. In 1981, when the BBC repeated the first four episodes of Doctor Who as part of their The Five Faces Of ... strand, they did so under the title An Unearthly Child. When Paul Cornell, Martin Day and this blogger wrote Doctor Who: The Discontinuity Guide (Virgin Books, 1995), we used the titles that the BBC did and said so, with hindsight rather sneeringly I'm afraid, in the introduction! We were young (well, this blogger was thirty two so not that young). Although, ironically, we considered ourselves as punk rockers kicking over the statues of established fandom when, in reality, it could be argued that by going down 'the BBC says so, so it's good enough for us' road we did, we were actually guilty of being establishment stooges. A question for another time, perhaps.
However, there was a fly in everyone's ointment. In the early 1990s, another trio of excellent fan writers - the previously mentioned David Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker - had begun their series of in-depth, scholarly books on the history of Doctor Who, starting with The Sixties (Virgin Publishing, 1993). Whilst writing it, they gained access to many internal BBC files and documents that us mere mortals had never been within a thousand miles of and found, in one of those 'everything you know is wrong' moments, that the production team had used a series of overall titles for those early serials which had never been heard of outside of the BBC. Serial A, it appears, was made under the overall title 100,000 BC - and was sold abroad to other territories like Australia under that title by BBC Enterprises. Serial B as The Mutants, serial C as Inside The Spaceship; that's where (with one exception, which we'll come to later) the differences ended. It seems that from Marco Polo onwards, everyone was singing from the same hymn sheet (or, the same script, anyway). Now, this blogger must point out at this stage that David, Mark and Stephen are all good fiends of his (David and Stephen, via their Telos imprint, have published several of this blogger's own works) and Keith Telly Topping greatly respects them and the sterling work they did in discovering all of this fascinating never-before-seen material. However, the question of what are the 'correct' title for those early Doctor Who serials remains a vexed one in fandom. It tends to raise somewhat 'heated debate' (for which read 'near-punch ups') among some fans. Ultimately, however, it doesn't really matter very much. Not in the great scheme of things. When we were writing The Discontinuity Guide, Cornell, Day and this blogger wondered (for about five seconds) how to handle this. Was serial A An Unearthly Child (the name the BBC used on the video release, the name Target Books used on the novelisation and the name we three and just about everyone we knew had always known it as)? Or, was it The Tribe Of Gum (a name that, at that stage, we believed had only ever been a draft title used by the author on his scripts and never beyond that)? Or, was it 100,000 BC (which, it seems, was used in plenty of 1963 BBC documentation but, again, nowhere else until David, Mark and Stephen found it lurking in some dusty filing cabinet at Television Centre)? It was no contest, really. And, whether serial B was The Daleks, The Mutants, The Dead Planet or Four Go Mad On Skaro With Radiation & Shit was, again, not really an issue worth getting too hassled about unless one needed to refer to it in a book, somewhere (in which case, for all of the reasons above, it was The Daleks for this blogger). For what it's worth, the only one of these 'production' titles that this blogger has any real issue with is some people's insistence on referring to the 1965 episode Mission To The Unknown - a one-episode stand-alone story (serial code T/A), with an on-screen title(!) - as Dalek Cutaway (which, again, appears to have been what it was called by the production team during its making). That is, clearly, a description of what the episode is rather than a 'title', per se. This blogger is absolutely sure there is 1965 BBC documentation which uses it (and he is equally sure Stephen, Mark and David have seen it!) but it remains a thoroughly rotten 'title' and has no place in the world, let alone in Doctor Who reference books as anything other than a curio of a footnote. That's Keith Telly Topping's story and he's sticking to it, dear blog reader.
Returning again, after some really long-winded diversions there, to this blogger's fiend JR and his intention of mocking the jolly unpleasant Mister Coburn's use of The Tribe Of Gum. First, however, JR did what all good journalists should do before being sneering in public about someone (even if they do really deserve it) and did a bit of research using the excellent British Newspaper Archive website (of which, this blogger is also a subscriber). And he was shocked - and stunned - at what he found. As, indeed, was this blogger. For there, on the 23 November 1963's television page of this blogger's own, beloved Newcastle Evening Chronicle, was a reference to the BBC's new 5:15pm drama, Doctor Who. And, to its first serial, called, they said, Dr Who & The Tribe Of Gum. There were a couple of other points of interest like, for instance, the suggestion that the series was aimed at a target audience of eleven-to-fourteen years olds and that the plot synopsis states, very clearly that The Doctor and his granddaughter are not only from a different time but, also, a different planet. The latter goes back to a question that The Lord Thy God Steven Moffat (OBE) posed some years ago about when it was that the series made absolutely clear that The Doctor was not human (or, at least, not of this Earth), because that's not stated in the opening episode (he talks about 'my civilisation' as opposed to 'my race' or 'my people'). So, for several reason then, not least the whole Tribe Of Gum thing, this was a truly fascinating find. Because, the newspaper had, obviously, got that title from somewhere, they hadn't just made it up.
Then, as if that wasn't enough, another of this blogger's excellent Facebook fiends, Paul Rhodes, discovered another 23 November 1963 reference to The Tribe Of Gum, this one again from a local newspaper - and, like the Evening Chronicle, a jolly important one, with a big circulation - the Liverpool Echo. Which would've been read, normally, by John, Paul, George and Ringo (a popular beat combo of the 1960s, you might've heard of them). But, as it happens, on that very day there were in Newcastle, playing their jungle Merseybeat rhythms at the City Hall. So, they might've read the Chronicle instead. Either way, The Tribe Of Gum got to them. Fab, gear.
So, we can see at least two newspapers in the UK had received information from somewhere - and, logically, it can only have been the BBC - which stated that this serial was known, at least internally, as The Tribe Of Gum. This is hugely different from most contemporary press coverage which only seems to use the episode title, An Unearthly Child. Take, for instance, the Radio Times piece on the BBC's new popular family SF drama.
Or the Daily Mirra's coverage which, again, just sticks with the episode title.
Or, for that matter, the Newcastle Journal, the sister-paper of the Chronicle. So, it appears as if even in the same newsroom (in Thomson House on The Bigg Market for those interested in such trivia) different TV editors were going off different sets of information.
Going back to the target audience idea again, the following week 30 November 1963, an excellent preview of Doctor Who's second episode from Stage & Television mentions that the show is 'said to have been written for ten-to-fourteen year olds.' Said, by whom, the piece doesn't elaborate but, as with the Chronicle's 'eleven-to-fourteen' statement the fact that two, not identical but certainly very similar, statements crops up in two places, suggests there was at least one BBC statement which suggested that particular target audience.
The same 30 November episode (The Cave Of Skulls), incidentally, brought out the very first example of 'Doctor Who? It's not as good as it used to be, is it?', an argument that would, in years to come, become something of a fandom staple. This glorious piece of arrant nonsense from Mary Crozier in the 2 December 1963 issue of the Gruniad Morning Star, deserves another moment of attention from pretty much everyone.
The issue of the target audience is interesting only because it exposes another apparent contradiction in the mixed-messages which seem to have been coming out of the BBC. There's nothing wrong with the suggestion that Doctor Who was aimed at ten and/or eleven-to-fourteen year olds; one imagine that age group did, indeed, take up a significant proportion of the audience that the series quickly built over the next few weeks. But, as noted above, the audience the BBC were seeking was always somewhat wider than that. The placement of Doctor Who between a programme primarily watched by grown men and a programme very popular with mid-to-late teens suggested a far greater age-range expectation and this is confirmed by much contemporary reporting. There is, for example, what seems to be the very first reference to Doctor Who published in a newspaper, from The Times on 13 September 1963, a full two-and-a-half months before the first episode of Doctor Who was broadcast. This was a report of a speech made by Stuart Hood, the then controller of BBC Television, at a conference in Blackpool in which he outlined a series of changes to BBC schedules coming in the months ahead. The majority of the coverage of this speech concentrated on the forthcoming return of That Was The Week That Was (the topical comedy satire, fronted by David Frost and considered 'controversial' by many newspapers because it gleefully mocked politicians that, by and large, the newspapers themselves didn't dare to). There were also references to the return of popular drama series like Maigret and Z Cars. Concerning new programmes, Hood spoke of Doctor Who as 'a new family series ... which borders on science fiction [which] will be broadcast on Saturdays.' This blogger's italics. And, you know what, dear blog reader? That one sentence remains, sixty years and one month later, still the best description for what the BBC's popular long-running family SF drama is all about.
In the interests of completeness, the Staffordshire Evening Sentinel also reported Hood's speech and mentioned Doctor Who (again, thanks to Paul Rhodes for discovering this). And, in the interest of completeness (and, for anyone who is compiling all of these clippings), here it is. This blogger has to say good on the Sentinel for reporting this, but in a race to which sounds the better 'the first reference to Doctor Who in the published media was in The Times on 13 September 1963 (also reported the same day in the Staffordshire Sentinel)' and 'the first reference to Doctor Who in the published media was in the Staffordshire Sentinel on 13 September 1963 (also reported the same day in The Times)' the old lady of Fleet Street wins every time. As noted, Stuart Hood's speech was widely reported elsewhere - in both the national and the local media - but these seem to be the only two direct references to Doctor Who that have turned up thus far. This blogger is hoping that a reference may yet turn up in What's On In Ashby-de-la-Zough just so Keith Telly Topping can get the credit for being the one to find it. The search continues.
A few weeks later - in fact, in the very week of this blogger's birth - but still a month away from the broadcast of An Unearthly Child, another excellent preview piece by the Kinematograph Weekly's Tony Gruner expanded on the information that the BBC had released to that point; it doesn't seem to mention any specific intended target age-group and, indeed, makes a point of noting that Doctor Who is being made by the BBC's Drama Department (series & serials) rather than the Children's Department.
The Birmingham Mail's 23 November 1963 piece included what appears to be another, seemingly, unique quote from the BBC which doesn't appear in any other preview that this blogger has come across - noting 'it is neither pure space travel nor science fiction ...' Edited to add: Stephen James Walker mentions that a press conference for forthcoming Drama Department productions, including Doctor Who, was held at the Langham in London on Thursday 21 November 1963. Maybe some of the unusual and/or unique quotes and information that found their way into various press reports over the following days came from journalists scribbling notes at that particular event? Donald Wilson chaired the conference, but David Whitaker was almost certainly present as well. It's a fascinating possibility which may explain some of these apparent one-off quotes.
To sum up the point of all this malarkey, dear blog reader. It's the processes in use that this blogger is interested in rather than the specific information being uncovered. Albeit, The Tribe Of Gum cropping up in two regional newspapers with no connection to each other is, indeed, a fascinating curio. This blogger worked for the BBC so he knows, roughly, how most of the processes work with regard to the dissemination of information; albeit, Keith Telly Topping freelanced for the Beeb from the early 2000s for a decade or more, so it's forty to fifty years after these events. Nevertheless, the process of how someone working for, say, a local UK newspaper in 2023 (not that there are many still existent UK local newspapers in 2023 - but that's a subject for a different blog entirely) who wants to write about the forthcoming Doctor Who sixtieth anniversary trilogy is easy. They can go on the Interweb and there's hundreds of pages (some more 'official' than others) that give them everything they want. In 1963, it was different. The production office would have had almost no involvement in publicising the series; they were too busy making it. The one exception would have been the Radio Times which, in those days, was an in-house BBC publication (and was run by adults). So it would have been quite common for the Radio Times editor or one of the feature writers (the marvellously named Gay Search, for instance), to get on the blower to, say, Verity Lambert or Mervyn Pinfield (or other members of the cast or crew) for some - albeit limited - direct input. Virtually every episode of Doctor Who's early years carried at least a quarter-page piece on the the making of and subjects of interest in the forthcoming episode in RT. But, with the published press, it was different. TV editors or journalist at all of the UK papers (both national and local) would have been dependent on whatever information they were given by the BBC. And, in this case, it would have been the press office, a specific department within the Beeb that, then just as now, takes all of the info they can access from the production office of a given show and makes a package of it. In the way of a press releases or a press pack. That still happens to this day although most of it is done online now. But, in 1963, if someone wrote their local paper's TV preview column and wanted to talk about a show that the BBC were broadcasting, they didn't just ring up some random person in Broadcasting House and say 'what's this Doctor Who thing all about, then?' Rather, they depended entirely on what they were given by the press office. Who, in turn, depended on what they were given by the production office. So, for instance, that's the reason why if you go through all of the 23 November 1963 papers (again, local and national) and they're writing a brief 'new series' piece on Doctor Who many of them read so similarly, using the same couple of Bill Hartnell quotes and the same description of what the series is about. That's because they are, quite literally, singing from the same hymn sheet (or, in this case, the same press release). That's why - and this is where JR's interest in The Tribe Of Gum very much piqued this blogger's own - when something different crops up, you have to wonder where they've got this information from and why, if it was from the usual sources, no one else had used the same thing? This is the overriding reason why The Tribe Of Gum turning up as a serial title in two local newspapers in different areas on the day of broadcast when everyone else was just using the episode title, is so interesting to me. It's also why a couple of publications suggesting that a specific age group was the target audience when, as far as this blogger can tell, the BBC themselves had always said, from day one (in fact, from two months before day one), that the target audience was 'all the family', is also worthy of note. And, it's why, when this blogger finds a seemingly direct quotation (at least, something in quotation marks) in one paper that doesn't seem to have appeared anywhere else, he is interested in that too. Because, knowing how the process should have worked in 1963, those sort of things should not have happened. But, they did. Keith Telly Topping will continue to trawl through the British Newspaper Archive website (he might as well get full value of the ten months that remain from his yearly subscription and not just use it for looking up the results and goal scorers in Newcastle United Reserve games in the Northern Alliance in 1922 - true story) and check out as many November and December 1963 papers as he can find; and, if he comes across anything different, strange or unique, posting them. Here, for instance, is a fragment of an article in the Liverpool Daily Post on how the author of the piece prefers serials over other forms of drama; Doctor Who is not only previewed but it's also one of the Picks Of The Week (along with The Avengers). This is particularly interesting because the TARDIS is mentioned (in most other early articles on Doctor Who it is just referred to 'the time machine'). And also because, although it doesn't give a specific age-range for the target audience it suggests, though this appears to be the author's analysis rather than anything he's been told, that the target audience is 'children and teenagers.' Which again, isn't a unique assessment (or even, necessarily a wrong one) but it is contrary to what the BBC were stating in every 'official' statement we've seen.
The author of that piece also noted, perceptively that a plot-devise like the TARDIS 'would seem to give the scriptwriters the widest choice of stories ever enjoyed by anybody.' Good spot, mate. Maybe, that's why in six weeks time Doctor Who will be enjoying a sixtieth anniversary.
So, in short, for Keith Telly Topping this has been a completely non-agenda-soaked intellectual exercise in being a Doctor Who geek, a BBC internal-politics geek, a social history geek and a 'reading old newspapers for fun' geek. And, this blogger's thanks go to (in no particular order) Andrew J Duncan, Daniel Blythe (who also provided the superb An Ungrateful Child image), Kathryn Sullivan, JR Southall, Dave Simmons, Tony Aloysius Amis, Tim Tucker, Michael Paul Rudzki, Nick Burgoyne, Teri N Sears, Stephen James Walker, Lance Parkin, David J Howe, Jan Fennick, Ben Adams, Helen Stirling, Alan Hayes, Francis Moloney, Mark Morris, Simon J Ballard, David A McIntee, Andy Bailey, Nigel Parry, Steve Herbert, Tim Drury, Joe Candora, Susan Springer Coleman, Steve Cooper, Nick Cooper, Richard Harris, John Hamilton, Chris Kocher, Paul Rhodes, Phil Newman, Catherine Cranston, Joel Brackenbury and Matthew Kilburn for their invaluable contributions to the Facebook thread which prompted this emergency bloggerisationisms update.
Right then, Mister That There So-Called Coburn, what're y'gonna do about them eggs, eh? Break into The Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House and smash the DVD? (... Please don't break into The Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House and smash the DVD if you'd be ever so kind, otherwise this blogger will have the fuggin' law onto ya.)
And finally, dear blog reader, more than one of this blogger's Facebook acquaintances drew a parallel between the current Mexican stand-off over the rights to An Unearthly Child/The Tribe of Gum/100,000 BC/The One With The Cavemen and the story of the chap who tried a decade ago, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to sue the BBC because he had 'created' Davros. (A Mexican stand-off should, really, happen over the rights to The Aztecs when you think about it.) The name of the chap in question was (and, presumably, still is) Steven Clark from Ashford in Kent and he claimed to have 'created' a half-man, half-Dalek in 1972 as part of a 'design a Doctor Who monster' competition run by TV Action comic, the judges of which were Mister Pertwee, Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts. Two of whom were, by the stage Clark made his claims public, dead and couldn't defend themselves against allegations of plagiarism. He got a - rather disgracefully agenda-soaked, anti-BBC - Daily Scum Mail story in 2011 out of his announced plans to sue the BBC claiming that he, and not Terry Nation, had created Davros, as covered by this blog here. His 'proof', he claimed, was a drawing which he had made in a school exercise book. Which, of course, was undated (although, to this blogger's untrained eye, it looked far more like the third on-screen Davros from 1984's Resurrection of The Daleks rather than either of the earlier ones). There was a follow-up story in 2012 (covered by this blog, here) where the chap was still trying to gather evidence and was appealing for people he'd gone to school with to come forward and back up his claims. Then it all went very quiet. Until, that is, Terrance Dicks told this blogger when we were having dinner in LA in 2013 that, at a preliminary hearing to decide whether there was a case to answer, the judge threw it out of court, saying that too much time had elapsed. If anyone is interested, this blogger will provide the link to the first Daily Scum Mail article (From The North sincerely apologises if anyone feels violated after reading that). We do, however, particularly wish to draw your attention to the below-the-line comments of one Tarquin "Porky" Hooten-Malloy, Eton, which are worth their weight in comedy gold.
