Doctor Who has always been a show with an incredible amount of boldness and ambition. But never more so than during its earliest seasons.
Whenever I revisit William Hartnell’s era of Doctor Who, it continually amazes me how confident the production team was during that period. Especially during those first two seasons. There’s an incredible amount of ambition throughout that’s just amazing to watch, even when the execution doesn’t quite match it.
Take The Daleks, for example. Writer Terry Nation threw a lot at the set designers for this story. The planet Skaro featured a variety of wildly different environments: luscious jungles; advanced cities; treacherous swamps and claustrophobic caverns. Even spread across seven episodes, it’s a huge amount to take on.
Fortunately, all of these wildly different environments were depicted perfectly by the production team. All the sets feel real and even have a sense of depth, helping to ensure that The Daleks became the much-loved classic that it was destined to be.
However, that was nothing compared to Nation’s next serial!
Stories like The Chase were ambitious in that they aimed to depict a different time and place with each and every episode.
(Photo by Clive Limpkin/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Weekly changes
Later in the same season, Terry Nation wrote The Keys of Marinus. Like the Daleks, it focused on just one planet, the titular Marinus. Sounds simple to depict, right? Except that this serial had a strong quest element, with the TARDIS crew sent all over the planet to locate five keys in five locations. And each location was radically different from the last!
The ambition of depicting six radically different environments in one story is incredible enough. But another thing to take into account is how intense the work schedule was for Sixties Who. It was essentially one episode a week – not just in terms of broadcast, but also production! That’s an incredibly intensive schedule, and certainly not something that could be done today, at least not with Doctor Who.
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Alien worlds
Even the stories that focused on just one environment for six weeks could have incredible ambition. For example, The Web Planet depicted two entirely alien races: the butterfly-like Menoptra, and the ant-like Zarbi. The only truly humanoid characters in the story were the regulars themselves. Even for today, that’s an incredibly bold story to tell. It’s not one of my favorite serials, but it’s certainly one that I respect.
In fact, the ambition and boldness of the First Doctor’s era is a big reason why I love it. Yes, Doctor Who has often been bolder than many other TV series, but it feels particularly true of this era. Even when it didn’t work, you couldn’t help but admire it. More than that, it often worked better than you’d expect for a series with such a low budget and intense production schedule. Decades later, and the work of everyone involved in the earliest seasons of Doctor Who is still impressive to watch.
What do you think of the ambition of the show’s earliest years? When do you think that ambition worked best? Were there any stories that made you wonder if the show had become too ambitious? Let us know in the comments below.