October 13, 2023 • 54 mins
Doctor Who has been a staple of British television and has reached global audiences. To understand the significance of this long-running series is to delve deep into the fabric of British popular culture, exploring themes that transcend mere entertainment. Whether it's the socio-political narratives that have been cleverly woven into its storylines or the imaginative realms it transports us to, Doctor Who has made an indelible impact, not just in the realm of science fiction, but in the broader context of British media.
David Turnbull, is our guest for today, brings a wealth of knowledge and insightful analysis. His published works on British television history offer a nuanced perspective, and today he will help us untangle the rich tapestry that makes Doctor Who a cultural phenomenon. We'll explore its beginnings, its pivotal moments, and of course, its enduring appeal.
For ardent fans, get ready for a captivating conversation filled with interesting trivia, scholarly discussion, and perhaps a fresh viewpoint on the Time Lord's many adventures. And if you're new to Doctor Who, what better time to get acquainted with this remarkable series than on its 60th anniversary?
So, make yourself comfortable, perhaps grab a cuppa, as we embark on a journey through time and space in the heart of London's history, through the lens of the Doctor's ever-astonishing escapades.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Hello and welcome to our London History Podcast where we share
our love of London. It's people, places and history.
It's designed for you to learn things about London that most
Londoners don't even know. I am your host Hazel Baker,
qualified London tour guide, andCEO and founder of London
(00:22):
guidedwalks.co dot UK. Each episode is supported by
show notes, transcripts, photos and further reading, all to be
found on our website. Click on londonguidedwalks.co
dot UK podcast and then select the episode that you fancy.
And if you enjoy what we do thenyou'll love our guided walks and
private tours that we offer throughout the year.
(00:46):
So get that cup of tea, put yourfeet up and enjoy.
Joining me in the studio today is David Turnbull, scifi and
horror author, having published A novella, A children's fantasy
featuring Dragons and airships, and a collection of flash
(01:09):
fiction. He is also a Lambeth tour guide
who offers Doctor Who walking tours through us at London
Guided Walks. Hello, David.
Hello, very nice to be here withyou this morning.
I'm looking forward to talking about one of my favorite
subjects, Doctor Who. Doctor Who?
(01:30):
Yeah, Doctor Who, Yeah. Well, that is one of the
questions because we do have people all across the world
listening in, so it might be worth introducing Doctor Who to
the audience. So Doctor Who is the longest
running science fiction series on television.
(01:51):
It came out fast in 1963, on the23rd of November, the day after
the World Shattering Event, The fact John F Kennedy's
assassination in Dallas, and theprogram.
Was slightly delayed on its broadcast because the BBC News
(02:12):
coverage of Lyndon Johnson's inauguration as the new
president of America had taken precedent.
And actually the the first series was repeated the
following Saturday because the BBC had invested so much.
In this new series that they wanted to make sure that people
(02:32):
got a second opportunity to see if they'd missed it.
So it has endured now for 60 years, although it was cancelled
in 1989. But thankfully it is now back on
air and one of the most popular TV shows in the UK and indeed in
many other countries across the world.
(02:56):
So as you quite rightly pointed out there, David, that Doctor
Who is now celebrating its 60th anniversary this November.
So what factors, in your opinion, have contributed to the
show's longevity? And also, what about thinking
about the cultural impact as well?
Well, I think for me that the premise of the show of a time
(03:21):
traveler who arrives in a time machine.
And can whisk your way to other worlds, ticks a lot of boxes
with people. I mean if you if you've got
quite a mundane life or maybe a hectic life, hectic life, or you
are a bit depressed about what you see on the news, the idea
(03:43):
that somebody could come and saywould you like to be my
companion. I have this police box you can
step inside. It's bigger on the inside than
it is on the outside. And I can take you to anytime in
history, anytime in the future. I can take you to alien planets.
I can take you to other worlds. So I think that is very
(04:05):
attractive. And it's not really a new idea.
You could in the past go througha wardrobe and end up in Narnia.
You could be taken by a lost boy.
On a flight to Neverland. So it's something in literature
and fantasy and science fiction that that is really quite a
(04:27):
common probe. I think it really goes back even
farther to to the stories of people who were taken into
Fairyland. And I can think going back to
the Scottish Borders, where I grew up, the story of Tamlyn.
Who went into the land of the fairies and and also the story
of Thomas the Reimer who fell asleep by the Ealden tree and
(04:51):
was enticed into fairy land by the fairy queen.
So I think there are are many similarities that that are
really embedded in the British culture.
If this idea of traveling to other worlds with a wizard or a
stranger or a time traveler and.Or a tour guide.
(05:13):
Yeah, we can take you into take,take you into the past.
We can speculate about the future and you can, we can show
you things you might never have seen before.
The BBC did a lot of research before they commissioned Doctor
Who. So.
So they were quite convinced at the time of the popularity of
science fiction. They had broadcast quater mass
(05:39):
in the 1950s. Nigel Neal's Professor and that
had been highly successful. They were aware of the emergence
of the animation puppet series, Fireball XL5 and other things
(06:00):
like that which were doing very well on ITV.
And they were of course aware that time travel and alien
invasions were something that was really invented in South
London by Bromley's own HG Wells.
So War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.
(06:20):
And at the time Doctor Who was commissioned, there had been a
very successful Hollywood cinemaversion of The Time Machine.
So. So they were pretty confident.
That this was going to be a popular series.
I don't think they ever expectedit would be a popular series for
60 years, but I think they thought they would get a few
(06:44):
years running on it. So they they they were, they
were really doing their homeworkbefore it came out.
And so in terms of the the impact, I mean I think the key
elements of the time traveler. And his companions and the
TARDIS I've just remained throughout the whole period, so,
(07:09):
so the the really key basics of Doctor Who hit that nerve,
ticked those boxes and it has remained throughout 60 years as
the basic premise of the show that there will be the Doctor as
a time traveler and he will by whatever storyline plot.
(07:29):
Find a new companion and off they will go on their
adventures. But I think there was a lot of
innovation in the early days in terms of set design and costume
design. There wasn't what we have now,
CGI, but so they had to innovateand I think a lot of that
(07:51):
influenced other BBC and ITV dramas in terms of set designs
and the way you put things. Together, costume designs, etc.
But one of the really lasting influences is the title
sequence. The famous Doctor Who title
music. It was composed by Ron Greiner
(08:14):
and he recruited a young woman called Delia Derbyshire to
really interpret. His composition and she came up
with the electronic synthesizer music that had really never been
heard in the UK before until that day in 1963, when suddenly
(08:34):
that music appeared on the screens.
It is very worldly, isn't it? Yeah it's it's it really does
fit in with the the theme of thethe show and it's been highly
influential. I mean the the I don't know if
people might. Be familiar with electronic
music of the 80s and 90s, but many of those bands have
(08:56):
referenced Delia Derbyshire as being an influence on them.
So the The A Fed Twins and The Chemical Brothers are really
very keen to say that she was the one that that helped them
investigate electronic music. There was also the title
sequence designed by Bernard Lodge.
(09:17):
So he he. Developed something called the
Howl Around, where he would point the camera back on its own
monitor and a bit like feedback from a speaker and a microphone.
It created all the imagery that you see at the beginning of
Doctor Who and again that was used in many, many TV programs,
(09:39):
particularly on Top of the Pops when they wanted a bit of
psychedelia and to accompany a band and.
You can see the influence in another sci-fi series, The
Tomorrow People, where the opening sequence looks very
similar to Doctor Who and guess who was involved in the music
(09:59):
for The Tomorrow People? Not that other than Delia
Derbyshire back with their synthesizer.
So yeah, I mean it really highlyinfluential in terms of the way
television was presented before the advent of CGI.
So really it's looking at doing your homework, doing the
(10:20):
research, making sure that you've got that, and then also
either keeping current i.e. the the landing on the moon and
looking at the futuristic music that's going on.
If you think Joe Meek at the same time is in that kind of
thing. And it's all pulling together
lots of different elements that you said about the filming
(10:41):
effects as well. So.
And then keeping it for six years, keeping it current.
Yeah, we're right in the middle of the the space race between
the Soviet Union and the Americans.
So that was on everybody's minds.
And and you mentioned Joe Meek and the famous Telstar, which
went to #1 actually. So yeah, as a Doctor Who
(11:05):
aficionado, can you maybe share some of your personal
recollections of the series overthe years?
So if anybody hasn't watched a series, you know you can find
them and which of the top ones that you would recommend people
look watch. So my relationship with Doctor
Who goes right back to the very beginning that day in 1963,
(11:30):
sixteen minutes past five on the23rd of November.
My birthday is the 25th of November, so there was a
birthday party going on in my grandparents house.
As I mentioned, I grew up in Selkirkshire, it was my 5th
birthday. My granddad was a Weaver in a
(11:52):
woolen mill back in the days when Selkirkshire was the center
of the Tweed industry and the Scottish Borders.
But he was also a huge science fiction fan.
In his younger days, he'd gone to see the movie matinees
starring Buster Crab So, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.
(12:14):
So whereas other grandparents might tell you stories about
Little Red Riding Hood or the three bears, he used to regale
us with stories. Of Flash Gordon and his
companions Dale Arden and Professor Zarkos Zarkov doing a
battle with Ming the Merciless on the planet Mongo.
(12:36):
So Doctor Who was right up his St. and at 5:15 the all the
birthday festivities stopped. I sat on his lap on the first
episode of Doctor Who started. And I think the the title
sequence and the music just drewus in immediately.
(13:01):
The first episode was called An Unearthly Child.
It was set in London and it featured William Hartnell as the
Doctor and Carol Ann Ford as theDoctor's granddaughter Susan.
And it was called An Unearthly Child.
The TARDIS had materialized in ain a scrap yard and Susan was
(13:25):
trying to put pass herself off as a secondary school student
and two teachers were very concerned about her welfare and
followed her to the scrap yard and were promptly whisked away
in the TARDIS back to the prehistoric era where they
encountered cave dwellers and. Were then essentially lost in
(13:51):
space. Not another famous TV series,
but they were lost in space and time, and they embarked on a
number of adventures with the Doctor Who and Susan.
So I think myself and my granddad were hooked from that
point and it became a ritual andtradition for us.
(14:13):
To be in his house at 5:15 everysingle Saturday to watch Doctor
Who all through the William Hartnell era and all through the
Patrick Trouten era. And he unfortunately died a
month or so after John Pertwee was announced as the new Doctor.
(14:34):
So he never got to see that era.But I carried on the tradition
and. Whenever I watch of it, I always
think fondly of him on his stories of Flash Gordon.
Yeah, I feel quite touched sometimes, just remembering how
we used to watch it and talk about the plots and it.
In those days, it always ended in a cliffhanger and we always
(14:57):
tried to guess what was going tohappen the following week.
And sometimes we were right, sometimes we got it completely
wrong. So it's a nice little memory.
But in terms of London, there's there's two series.
The really stuck stick in my mind.
So the first one was 1964 William Hartnell era Daleks
(15:21):
invasion of the F and it's the famous scene where the Daleks
appear on Westminster Bridge with the backdrop of the House
of Commons. They'd first met the Daleks on
The Planet of the Daleks, which was the second series after the
The Cave Dweller episode. They thought they'd been
defeated, but lo and behold, in the 22nd century the Daleks had
(15:45):
invaded and conquered the earth.It started, funnily enough, on
the 21st of November. It was the second series, so
quite near my birthday again. And it ended on Boxing Day, so
there was I think 6 episodes, so.
(16:07):
There there's the scenes on Westminster Bridge, there's the
scenes on the Riverside walkway at the side of Saint Thomas's
Hospital, and there's the reallyiconic scene of a Dalek rising
from the River Thames down at Hammersmith Bridge.
So it it was extremely popular and it was it made the front
(16:30):
page of lots of the newspapers because the publicity sorts
shots with the Daleks coming over the bridge.
Made really good front pages, soit was also the last episode
that Caroline Ford appeared in. There's a little bit of a love
story goes on in this episode. She falls in love with one of
(16:53):
the resistance fighters and she decides to stay in the 22nd
century to help rebuild the world.
After the Dialects have been defeated.
So it's quite a touching monologue by William Hartnell at
the end of that episode that people think in addition to
(17:15):
being part of the storyline was also his farewell to Caroline
Ford and. I remember watching it after she
left and always thinking, I wonder what she's doing now, as
if it really had happened. You know, I was, I used to
always. Yeah.
Just thinking, I wonder what she's doing back on Earth now.
And yeah, is she helping? And yeah, so it did seem very
(17:39):
real to me. But there was also a movie
version of the Daleks Invasion of the Earth with Peter Cushing,
famous Hammer horror actor, playing the role of the Doctor
that it was the 2nd movie. First movie was a recreation of
the planet of the dialects. The second one had Bernard
(18:00):
Cribbins in it as a policeman who gets transported to the
future with the Doctor on the the base of the Earth.
Resistance to the dialect is theEmbankment tube station, so they
go down into the Embankment and it's really tube stations.
That would be my second choice for a London.
(18:22):
Series, and that was in the Patrick Trouten era.
This went out in March 1968 and it was called the Web of Fear,
and it featured another type of robot called the Yeti, which the
Doctor had first encountered in Tibet.
(18:44):
And they looked like Abominable Snowman, but they were
mechanical. And in the Web of Fear, they and
Veddy invaded the London Underground system and the whole
of London was covered in a strange fungus looking web.
So it features Covent Garden, Good St.
Victoria Station amongst others.It is quite famous because at
(19:10):
one point only one episode had survived.
And then somebody found some sine reels in Nigeria and lo and
behold, another four episodes turned up.
So there's now five episodes of a six episode serial, The Web of
Fear. If anybody finds the final sixth
(19:35):
missing episode in their attic, I think they would be in for
quite a nice little bit of income from that.
Especially from yeah, the BBC who really keen to reverse what
they did in the 60s and tape over shows they really came to
try and relocate them and archive.
(19:55):
So that was confusion. I told him he isn't there.
Yeah, yeah. There's lots of very famous
series with that entire episodesmissing, just taped over, and
people never thought that these would become.
Classic series that that people would be interested in going
back and revisiting. So there's some of the the the
(20:21):
London focused ones, it's quite that really.
And you mentioned about London serving as a drop drop, a
backdrop for numerous Doctor Whoepisodes.
What about those iconic London landmarks though, that have made
appearances in the show, I mean on your walk, which I very much
enjoyed. I mean we we get to see the the,
(20:41):
the Houses of Parliament, don't we?
Across the the river like you doin the TV show.
Yeah, I mean the the Houses of Parliament and the clock tower
of Big Ben have have really featured in a lot of Doctor Who
episodes. So I've mentioned Invasion of
the Daleks, David Tennant's first appearance as Doctor Who.
(21:05):
The TARDIS is out of control andspinning through the sky, and it
knocks a big chunk of masonry off the Clock tower as it as it
flies to crash land further along the Thames.
So it's his first appearance comes about.
Then Peter Capaldi's first appearance has the House of
(21:26):
Parliament and Big Ben as a backdrop.
His is quite strange. It's set in the Victoria
Victorian era, but the walkway behind Saint Thomas's Hospital.
There is a Tyrannosaurus Rex prowling along there and it's
actually swallowed the TARDIS and then it coughs it up.
(21:50):
It shoots out like a piece of meat that might be stuck in
somebody's throat and goes spinning through the air.
And then Peter Capaldi makes hisdebut as as Doctor Who.
It's also been used by John Barrowman who famous for
(22:10):
musicals but also played CaptainJack in the Doctor Who series
and in one episode he tethers his spaceship to the tower of
Big Ben. So it's used quite a lot in
Doctor Who. The post office tower appears in
(22:34):
the movie, so it hadn't been long built and I think they
wanted something iconic to show it was London because the the
the premise is that the city hasbeen completely devastated by
the dialect invasion. Buildings are lying in rubble,
etcetera. But you still see the post
(22:56):
office tower in the background. So it's managed to survive and
probably it was the marker pointto say this is London in the
22nd century. Here's something you recognize.
Yeah, I think if you're talking about introducing the new Doctor
each time, you've got to providesomething familiar to the
(23:19):
audience if you're new as well. Coming home each time, yeah.
And in the old series, he quite often rematerialized inside the
Targets and you had no sense of where he was.
But the new one always seems to have some sort of iconic
landmark, whether it's London orelsewhere.
(23:40):
You can bring him in, yeah. The Shard and the London Eye
have also appeared inducted. The Shard was in The Bells of
St. John, where the great
Intelligence is in collusion with Miss Kislet, played by the
wonderful Celia Emery, and they're using the Wi-Fi system
(24:03):
to try and influence people's behavior.
It's the it's during the Matt Smith era and it's the episode
that introduces Jenna Louise Coleman as his new companion.
And she has appeared in the in the series before because Matt
(24:25):
Smith has been tracking her overdifferent periods of time.
So in past lives he's met her, but it's this version in the in
the 21st century that becomes his companion.
And Matt Smith said it's this isone of his favorite episodes
because he got to roar across Westminster Bridge and Waterloo
(24:49):
Bridge on a motorbike and it felt like he was in The Bourne
Identity and not in an episode of Doctor.
Which was also filmed around Waterloo.
Which was also felt around Waterloo.
Yeah, and then the real big one for people who like the new
series. Almost important.
As important as the 23rd of November 1963, the 26th of March
(25:12):
2005, Russell T Davis has finally persuaded the BBC to
relaunch Doctor Who and it relaunches at the London Eye.
So the London Eye has again beentaken over by an alien
intelligence, this time called the Nesting Consciousness, who
(25:36):
is in league with something called the Autumns, who can
animate shop dummies, and it introduces Billie Piper as Rose.
So a lot of the scenes are filmed again with House of
Commons in the background, but really the London Eye as the
(25:59):
main scene. And Russell T Davis was given
permission to add additional lighting to the London Eye so
that it looked even more bright in the night sky than it already
does. So it's a it's quite an
important sight for the new generation of Doctor Who fans.
(26:24):
That's where for them, really, it all started with Christopher
Eccleston and Billy Piper. That's just scary, isn't it?
It's also in the remake of Ghostbusters in 2016 and those
mannequins. It's just scary thoughts, yeah.
I mean, anything, anything that usually stands still and looks
(26:46):
lifeless, which then comes to life is quite terrifying.
And I think that's something Doctor Who does quite well, is
to scare adults and children. And again, it's something that
that has stuck with it throughout.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with being
scared, as long as you know thatit's fantasy and fiction.
(27:10):
And famously behind the couch ishow people describe watching
Doctor Who, isn't it? Yes, well, indeed.
My sister still watches Jaws when she has her feet up off the
floor, just in case. Now you mentioned a number of
areas, number of Doctor Who's and how.
(27:31):
I suppose my question is how hasthe portrayal of Doctor Who
changed over the years and is there a distinct difference
between the classic series and now this revised version?
Is there any big, big similarities or differences?
So I I think the the the original portrayal was a a
(27:54):
grandfatherly figure who was actually a grandfather to Susan.
He he wore a a Victorian frock coat.
He was a bit like the kind of stereotypical professor in a
science fiction story. He was quite grumpy.
(28:19):
Patrick Troughton actually turned to Charlie Chaplin for
his inspiration, so he wanted todifferentiate himself from
William Hartnell. So he kind of played him as a
little bit of a disheveled trampwho, while being highly
(28:42):
intelligent, kind of bumbled andbungled his way through things.
So he he had a different interpretation.
So, so I would say Hartnell was a grandfather, Patrick Trout and
was a mad uncle, and John Pertwee was more like a kind of
father figure to his companions.Yeah.
(29:04):
So I think it's really from Tom Baker onwards that it kind of
became a bit more eccentric, a bit more being on an equal
footing to the companions and a lot more outlandish outfits,
particularly in the three 1980s Doctors, Peter Davidson, Colin
(29:28):
Baker, they they they wore bright colors rather than the
dark colors that you'd seen previously.
So I I I think that was the big change.
I think that the change really in the new series is there's
been probably a lot more diversity.
(29:50):
So we've had our first woman Doctor Who, we're about to have
our first black Doctor Who. And again, when the series was
rebooted, Russell T Davis was quite keen that he had less of a
middle class feel about it. So Christopher Eccleston played
(30:12):
the Doctor with the northern accent and Billy Piper lived on
a council housing estate and wasa shop assist.
The housing estate, by the way, is in Lambeth, so it's the
Brandon housing estate. Many of the scenes from Doctor
Who were filmed there. It's just on the edge of
Kennington Park, although in theseries it's supposed to be
(30:34):
Peckham, which given the rivalrybetween Southwark and Lambeth
doesn't go down too well, but itthat the brand dynasty is very
definitely in Lambeth. Now you mentioned about Doctor
Who incorporating real thoughts,time, places and that also then
includes about real historical figures as well into the
(30:56):
stories. So what London historical
figures and events have been featured or referenced in the
series? Well, if you go back to the
original series, the executives at the BBC were extremely keen
that it should meet the Lord Wreath remit to entertain,
(31:16):
educate and inform. So they wanted not so many bug
eyed monsters and robots but forthe doctor to travel back in
time to historical periods. And the the reason they had two
(31:36):
school teachers was to make it give it the educational flavor.
So in the early years they went back in the first episode to The
Cave dwellers time. They also accompanied Marco Polo
on his voyages to China. They went to South America to
the Aztec period. They went to the French
(32:00):
Revolution and they went to the Battle of Culloden where Patrick
Trout and recruited his companion Jamie Mccrimmon who
was played by Fraser Hines, alsoknown for Emmerdale Farm but the
longest running so far, Doctor Who companion so.
So there was a big push to have historical factual series
(32:27):
counterbalancing the ones with monsters and aliens.
But really the second serial of the series was Planet of the
Daleks, and they just became so popular that the the monsters
and robots and creatures really took over.
(32:50):
And I think the ratio now over the 60 years is that 80% of
episodes have featured aliens, robots or monsters, and 20% are
purely historical. And you won't find a purely
historical episode. Now, Doctor Who will meet
(33:12):
historical characters, but there's always a monster lurking
in the background in the story line.
So some of the people, yeah, of course it couldn't be anything
less. So some of the people he's met,
HG Wells quite fittingly, Charles Dickens, Vincent van
(33:32):
Gogh, George Stevenson of the Railways fame are amongst the
people that that he's met. The two in the the most recent
series who've reoccurred quite afew times are Queen Victoria and
Winston Churchill. And both of them have have kind
of reappeared quite a few times in either in cameo roles or in
(33:58):
episodes where they are the central character.
And both of them are kind of involved in helping the Doctor
to defend the Earth against alien invasions in different
ways. The Churchill one, that is
really the main 1, So it's one of the scenes is on the roof of
(34:23):
the Churchill base in Whitehall and it looks across the
Parliament and you can see airships and dirigibles flying
over Parliament. The Doctor and Churchill
acknowledge each other because they've known each other for
many years. And Churchill tells the Doctor
(34:44):
I've acquired a weapon that can defeat the Nazis and Hitler.
And then he reveals the weapon and it turns out to be a Dalek.
So I think it it kind of reflects the nuclear weapons
Oppenheimer kind of storyline. If you have a weapon with such
(35:07):
devastating power, do you dare use it?
And the Doctor spends all the episode trying to convince
Churchill that it's not a very good idea to unleash a Dalek,
even though it might defeat Hitler.
And Hitler is In another storyline, the character River
(35:29):
Song, played by Alex Kingston, who is the Doctor's daughter.
Through quite a convoluted plot line, she is sent by another
alien back in time to kill Hitler, And that's a very
familiar science fiction trope. If you had the ability to travel
(35:51):
back in time, would you kill Hitler?
And if you did, what would the consequences be?
Might not. They might not all be good.
Yeah. They could be disastrous.
Yeah. Yeah, indeed.
Well, the last Indiana Jones whois going back to 1939, isn't it?
Yeah, that same same kind of thought.
(36:12):
So when you're talking about Doctor Who, a lot of the time
you're talking about London as well.
So they seem to have this symbiotic relationship.
How do you think that the city'sinfluenced the storytelling of
Doctor Who and vice versa? So I think it very clearly
influenced the original series because at the time World War
(36:39):
Two was still fresh in people's minds.
The Blitz was still fresh in people's minds.
You could walk through parts of London and still see bomb sites,
bomb ruins. So the the the idea that there
were alien forces ready to invade was within living memory.
(37:05):
And Terry Nation who who wrote the Daleks really based his idea
of these emotionless robots who want to exterminate everybody on
his recollection as a child of the the Nazis and and what he'd
heard on radio about their conduct and and the Blitz.
(37:28):
So I think the London you see inthe the early series is
obviously black and white television, quite grainy.
It didn't really matter whether you had people in rubber suits
and cardboard film sets, becauseyou probably couldn't see them
(37:49):
very well anyway on your screen.And I think that's really the
big difference, is that the original series was serialized,
so every story was 1/2 hour, ended on a cliffhanger and then
moved to the next part of the story.
(38:11):
And I think they could take their time to tell the story
much more slowly than the expectations of of today.
So, so you've got CGI, you've got HD television.
So they have to be really good with the special effects to to
(38:31):
achieve what used to be achievedreally with bits of string and
washing up bottles. But so I think the storytelling
has to be a lot quicker now. So whereas in the past they had
time over over probably 6 episodes per serial to develop
(38:54):
the characters and the storyline, if you watch it now,
it's very punchy. It jumps from scene to scene.
Sometimes you can hardly keep up, sometimes you have to watch
an episode twice to figure out what's going on.
And I think probably that reflects the London we live in
today where everything happens very quickly.
(39:16):
We've got access to Wi-Fi and Internet, we can find out
information really quickly, we get news very quickly.
So things change very rapidly. So for me that that is kind of
the the, the, the influence on of the current day situation on
(39:39):
the way Doctor Who is presented and that I think that probably
reflects back on on how people expect stories to be told
nowadays. So it's as a sci-fi writer, I
wouldn't write in the style of HG Wells today because that's
(39:59):
not what people expect. Yeah, they expect the action to
move quite quickly. They don't want pages and pages
of exposition or explanation, they just want to get on with
the story. So I think people's viewing and
reading attitudes have changed greatly since 1963 and no doubt
(40:23):
connected to the development of the Internet on live streaming
television, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And this whole like you can pause it if the door rings or et
cetera or you can, yeah, I mean.Yeah, I mean, if you missed an
episode of Doctor Who in 1963, that was it.
(40:44):
Unless the BBC decided to do a repeat.
So you could lose a bit of the plot because you've missed an
episode. Now you can just go back and get
it on BBC iPlayer and catch up whenever you feel like it.
So it's a bit like you've got your own time machine now, isn't
(41:05):
it? Oh, there you go.
See Time Machine in your own house?
Absolutely. Yeah.
So you mentioned about several Doctor Who episodes where the
the center around alien invasions in London.
How are these episodes in, in your view, play into or perhaps
challenge the British cultural attitudes and societal concerns,
(41:29):
you know invasion. We're an island, yeah.
I mean I think it does play to that and I think as I said the
the Daleks and the Nazis are arequite a good example.
You've also got the Cybermen, which are the second most
popular Doctor Who for, and they've got an equally famous
(41:55):
scene when they come down the steps of Saint Paul's in the
city, so they've got their iconic scene.
I think over the years the interpretation of that has
changed a bit. So Remembrance of the Dialects,
(42:16):
which was filmed in Waterloo, was written by Ben Aranovich,
who later went on to become quite famous for the Rivers of
London series. He was 23 when he wrote it.
So imagine that you get your first break in television and
you get to write the 25th anniversary episode of Doctor
(42:36):
Who. So in In Remembrance of the
Daleks, in his novelization he gets the opportunity to explore
racism quite a bit. So in in the in the TV series,
there is a former member of Oswald Mosley's Black Shirts
(42:58):
who's in league with the Daleks,and he gets to explore that a
bit more with the Doctor's companion Ace, played by Sophie
Aldred, who was born in Greenwich.
And there is a little backdrop to a story where she's quite
(43:19):
attracted to one of the soldiers, but then finds out
that he is in league with the member of the Black Shirts.
And this triggers for us her a memory of his girlfriend who is
Indian and had faced quite a severe racial attack.
(43:41):
So I think as society has moved on, the storylines in Doctor Who
quite often pick up on on those things and certainly the
terrorism attacks of the past few years kind of reflect a lot
of people's concerns. So quite often when you when you
(44:05):
see things exploding in Doctor Who, there'll be a storyline
attached to why that is happening.
It can lead to the wrong interpretation.
We've obviously got quite a lot going on at the moment about
migrants and refugees and and and flooding the country and all
(44:28):
sorts of things being said aboutthat.
So I I think the the Doctor Who series is quite good at
addressing this and the thing that I think is absolutely
brilliant is that the next Doctor Who Shetty Gatwa, came to
this country as a 2 year old refugee from the Romanden
(44:51):
massacre. He made his home in Dundee.
So a refugee is now going to become the most iconic character
on British TV. So I I think that is really an
excellent decision for the 60th anniversary and really reflects
(45:11):
the multicultural society that we live in.
And if we move away from the screen, Doctor Who and we move
more into the cultural fabric through fan clubs, conventions
and even museum exhibits. Can you speak about these,
(45:33):
especially with the role in London's cultural music?
So I think obviously 10 years ago we had the 50th anniversary.
We've now got the 60th, 1:00. So it comes to the forefront at
those periods of time. But at any given time there will
be something connected to DoctorWho going on, whether it's an
(45:57):
exhibition, a film showing at the BFI, a meeting of a Doctor
Who convention, that there's always something going on.
And really, I think that's why when it was cancelled in 1989,
it survived because there was novels, there was audio plays
(46:18):
and really the Doctor Who fan base kept it alive.
So there is some quite unusual things.
So the Vauxhall Tavern, famous LGBTQI venue, famous for its
drag shows, they regularly have what's called the Gallifrey
(46:42):
Cabaret, and Gallifrey is the planet that Doctor Who comes
from. And they have a TARDIS on stage
and there's all sorts of shenanigans involving Cybermen
and and other creatures dancing to disco music.
So, so even in that that sort ofaspect, it seeps its way into
(47:05):
the culture. A Doctor Who is quite big in the
gay community. Russell T Davis famously was the
director and writer of Queer as Folk and John Barrowman played
the first bisexual character andBill Potts, the companion, was
(47:26):
the first openly gay companion. So it's it's got quite a strong
relationship with the gay community.
And the other thing really that is sadly missed is the Museum of
the Moving Image, which used to be on the South Bank.
They had Daleks, Tartices, all sorts of monster costumes on
(47:50):
display, and they had an extremely popular exhibition
called Behind the Sofa. But the BFI itself has got the
Doctor Who archives, so they've got the scripts of almost every
series in serial, and you can access them through the
archives. They've got some of the series,
(48:14):
some of the films, they've got books and academic papers on
Doctor Who. So it's well worth joining the
Rubin Library at the BFI if you're interested in finding out
more. There is obviously the Doctor
Who shop in Upton Park. Quite difficult to find if you
(48:37):
don't know the area, but definitely people find their way
there and they've got all sorts of Doctor Who memorabilia there
that you can buy and also a little Doctor Who museum.
So plenty of things you can do, but a couple of things that are
really interesting to me are theDalek builders.
(49:00):
So some people restore motorbikes and vintage cars.
These guys build Daleks from scratch to the specifications
from Doctor Who and they look really impressive and they turn
up village fates and and shop openings and stuff like that.
So, but honestly, if you see them, you wouldn't be able to
(49:22):
differentiate by something that that's made in the BBC Props
workshop. There's also the collectors of
memorabilia. So there's lots of things that
have come out of the show. Dalek models, Airfix models,
jigsaws. One of the ones that really
(49:42):
interests me because I actually remember buying these is the
candy cigarettes produced by Cadet Sweets called Doctor Who
and the Daleks. So you would get 10 little candy
cigarettes and you would get a card and the card would be a
little section of a Doctor Who story.
(50:04):
So there was two series 50 cards, and if you collect them,
there was a narrative on the reverse side.
And on the front side there was an illustration to go with that
narrative. So if anybody has a collection
of series one and series two of the Cadet sweets, candy,
(50:26):
cigarettes, Doctor Who and the Dialects collection, again I
think they could make themselvesa nice little bit of income from
that. So I think it's influenced loads
of things in London and in widerUK culture.
And if someone were to take yourDoctor Who tour in Waterloo,
(50:50):
what are the key takeaways you hope they'd gain with regarding
the show's history and its relationship with London?
Well, I think firstly the real and important connections
between the show and Waterloo. Three major episodes were filmed
in the area. The BBC workshop where the
(51:14):
Daleks were invented is in the area and the designer of the
Daleks, Ray Cusack is a lamb with born Boy and one of the
voices of the Daleks, Peter Hawkins who came up with the
(51:39):
Exterminate You will be the Daleks.
He was born in Lambeth and he also was the voice of Bill and
Ben, the Flower Pot men and all the voices in the Captain
Pugwash series. Yeah, what a talent. 2 doctors
were born in Lambeth, one of them in Waterloo.
(52:03):
So that there is a lot of connections and a lot of history
with the series in Doctor Who. So I think I would like people
to think about the locations andthe innovations linked to the
series, but not only that, at each stop to get a sense of the
(52:24):
wider history of the area, the places we're looking at, because
there is a lot of history in Waterloo.
It's quite a touristy area now, but it has an industrial past.
It has a past where it was completely devastated during the
(52:46):
Blitz. It also has the connections to
the Battle of Waterloo, with Waterloo Bridge being named
after that battle and then giving its name to the station,
which then in turn gives its name to the area.
And perhaps one of the most important things is the Festival
of Britain 1951, a celebration of British innovation with lots
(53:10):
of sci-fi things. They they had a satellite dish
that bounced messages of the moon.
They had the Dome of Discovery and the pioneered 3D Cinema
1951. We think we're quite modern now.
We go to the iMac Cinema, we puton our 3D glasses and watch a
(53:34):
blockbuster. Well, they were doing that on
the South Bank in 1951. So I think those would be the
kind of things I would like people to bring away.
Sense of the history of Doctor Who, but also a sense of the
history of Waterloo. Yeah, fantastic.
And we've also got an episode about Festival of Britain, so
I'll include that in the in the show nights for everybody to
(53:57):
listen to as well. And so 54.
So David, thank you very much for for that.
I mean, you can really get down to the detail, but the walk is
very good because a it's a beautiful walk anyway and
there's lots of things for you to to learn and put in and
behind the scenes, but that's the bit because I'm really nosy
like that. So for anybody wanting to book a
(54:19):
walking tour with David, he doespublic guided walks.
The dates for the start of two 2024 are already up.
So you can book individual tickets for that, but also
private tours are available as well.
Thank you, David. Appreciate it.
Thank you. And I look forward to guiding
people through time and relativedimensions.
(54:42):
That's all for now. Until next time.
Hello and welcome to our London History Podcast where we share
our love of London. It's people, places and history.
It's designed for you to learn things about London that most
Londoners don't even know. I am your host Hazel Baker,
qualified London tour guide, andCEO and founder of London
(00:22):
guidedwalks.co dot UK. Each episode is supported by
show notes, transcripts, photos and further reading, all to be
found on our website. Click on londonguidedwalks.co
dot UK podcast and then select the episode that you fancy.
And if you enjoy what we do thenyou'll love our guided walks and
private tours that we offer throughout the year.
(00:46):
So get that cup of tea, put yourfeet up and enjoy.
Joining me in the studio today is David Turnbull, scifi and
horror author, having published A novella, A children's fantasy
featuring Dragons and airships, and a collection of flash
(01:09):
fiction. He is also a Lambeth tour guide
who offers Doctor Who walking tours through us at London
Guided Walks. Hello, David.
Hello, very nice to be here withyou this morning.
I'm looking forward to talking about one of my favorite
subjects, Doctor Who. Doctor Who?
(01:30):
Yeah, Doctor Who, Yeah. Well, that is one of the
questions because we do have people all across the world
listening in, so it might be worth introducing Doctor Who to
the audience. So Doctor Who is the longest
running science fiction series on television.
(01:51):
It came out fast in 1963, on the23rd of November, the day after
the World Shattering Event, The fact John F Kennedy's
assassination in Dallas, and theprogram.
Was slightly delayed on its broadcast because the BBC News
(02:12):
coverage of Lyndon Johnson's inauguration as the new
president of America had taken precedent.
And actually the the first series was repeated the
following Saturday because the BBC had invested so much.
In this new series that they wanted to make sure that people
(02:32):
got a second opportunity to see if they'd missed it.
So it has endured now for 60 years, although it was cancelled
in 1989. But thankfully it is now back on
air and one of the most popular TV shows in the UK and indeed in
many other countries across the world.
(02:56):
So as you quite rightly pointed out there, David, that Doctor
Who is now celebrating its 60th anniversary this November.
So what factors, in your opinion, have contributed to the
show's longevity? And also, what about thinking
about the cultural impact as well?
Well, I think for me that the premise of the show of a time
(03:21):
traveler who arrives in a time machine.
And can whisk your way to other worlds, ticks a lot of boxes
with people. I mean if you if you've got
quite a mundane life or maybe a hectic life, hectic life, or you
are a bit depressed about what you see on the news, the idea
(03:43):
that somebody could come and saywould you like to be my
companion. I have this police box you can
step inside. It's bigger on the inside than
it is on the outside. And I can take you to anytime in
history, anytime in the future. I can take you to alien planets.
I can take you to other worlds. So I think that is very
(04:05):
attractive. And it's not really a new idea.
You could in the past go througha wardrobe and end up in Narnia.
You could be taken by a lost boy.
On a flight to Neverland. So it's something in literature
and fantasy and science fiction that that is really quite a
(04:27):
common probe. I think it really goes back even
farther to to the stories of people who were taken into
Fairyland. And I can think going back to
the Scottish Borders, where I grew up, the story of Tamlyn.
Who went into the land of the fairies and and also the story
of Thomas the Reimer who fell asleep by the Ealden tree and
(04:51):
was enticed into fairy land by the fairy queen.
So I think there are are many similarities that that are
really embedded in the British culture.
If this idea of traveling to other worlds with a wizard or a
stranger or a time traveler and.Or a tour guide.
(05:13):
Yeah, we can take you into take,take you into the past.
We can speculate about the future and you can, we can show
you things you might never have seen before.
The BBC did a lot of research before they commissioned Doctor
Who. So.
So they were quite convinced at the time of the popularity of
science fiction. They had broadcast quater mass
(05:39):
in the 1950s. Nigel Neal's Professor and that
had been highly successful. They were aware of the emergence
of the animation puppet series, Fireball XL5 and other things
(06:00):
like that which were doing very well on ITV.
And they were of course aware that time travel and alien
invasions were something that was really invented in South
London by Bromley's own HG Wells.
So War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.
(06:20):
And at the time Doctor Who was commissioned, there had been a
very successful Hollywood cinemaversion of The Time Machine.
So. So they were pretty confident.
That this was going to be a popular series.
I don't think they ever expectedit would be a popular series for
60 years, but I think they thought they would get a few
(06:44):
years running on it. So they they they were, they
were really doing their homeworkbefore it came out.
And so in terms of the the impact, I mean I think the key
elements of the time traveler. And his companions and the
TARDIS I've just remained throughout the whole period, so,
(07:09):
so the the really key basics of Doctor Who hit that nerve,
ticked those boxes and it has remained throughout 60 years as
the basic premise of the show that there will be the Doctor as
a time traveler and he will by whatever storyline plot.
(07:29):
Find a new companion and off they will go on their
adventures. But I think there was a lot of
innovation in the early days in terms of set design and costume
design. There wasn't what we have now,
CGI, but so they had to innovateand I think a lot of that
(07:51):
influenced other BBC and ITV dramas in terms of set designs
and the way you put things. Together, costume designs, etc.
But one of the really lasting influences is the title
sequence. The famous Doctor Who title
music. It was composed by Ron Greiner
(08:14):
and he recruited a young woman called Delia Derbyshire to
really interpret. His composition and she came up
with the electronic synthesizer music that had really never been
heard in the UK before until that day in 1963, when suddenly
(08:34):
that music appeared on the screens.
It is very worldly, isn't it? Yeah it's it's it really does
fit in with the the theme of thethe show and it's been highly
influential. I mean the the I don't know if
people might. Be familiar with electronic
music of the 80s and 90s, but many of those bands have
(08:56):
referenced Delia Derbyshire as being an influence on them.
So the The A Fed Twins and The Chemical Brothers are really
very keen to say that she was the one that that helped them
investigate electronic music. There was also the title
sequence designed by Bernard Lodge.
(09:17):
So he he. Developed something called the
Howl Around, where he would point the camera back on its own
monitor and a bit like feedback from a speaker and a microphone.
It created all the imagery that you see at the beginning of
Doctor Who and again that was used in many, many TV programs,
(09:39):
particularly on Top of the Pops when they wanted a bit of
psychedelia and to accompany a band and.
You can see the influence in another sci-fi series, The
Tomorrow People, where the opening sequence looks very
similar to Doctor Who and guess who was involved in the music
(09:59):
for The Tomorrow People? Not that other than Delia
Derbyshire back with their synthesizer.
So yeah, I mean it really highlyinfluential in terms of the way
television was presented before the advent of CGI.
So really it's looking at doing your homework, doing the
(10:20):
research, making sure that you've got that, and then also
either keeping current i.e. the the landing on the moon and
looking at the futuristic music that's going on.
If you think Joe Meek at the same time is in that kind of
thing. And it's all pulling together
lots of different elements that you said about the filming
(10:41):
effects as well. So.
And then keeping it for six years, keeping it current.
Yeah, we're right in the middle of the the space race between
the Soviet Union and the Americans.
So that was on everybody's minds.
And and you mentioned Joe Meek and the famous Telstar, which
went to #1 actually. So yeah, as a Doctor Who
(11:05):
aficionado, can you maybe share some of your personal
recollections of the series overthe years?
So if anybody hasn't watched a series, you know you can find
them and which of the top ones that you would recommend people
look watch. So my relationship with Doctor
Who goes right back to the very beginning that day in 1963,
(11:30):
sixteen minutes past five on the23rd of November.
My birthday is the 25th of November, so there was a
birthday party going on in my grandparents house.
As I mentioned, I grew up in Selkirkshire, it was my 5th
birthday. My granddad was a Weaver in a
(11:52):
woolen mill back in the days when Selkirkshire was the center
of the Tweed industry and the Scottish Borders.
But he was also a huge science fiction fan.
In his younger days, he'd gone to see the movie matinees
starring Buster Crab So, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.
(12:14):
So whereas other grandparents might tell you stories about
Little Red Riding Hood or the three bears, he used to regale
us with stories. Of Flash Gordon and his
companions Dale Arden and Professor Zarkos Zarkov doing a
battle with Ming the Merciless on the planet Mongo.
(12:36):
So Doctor Who was right up his St. and at 5:15 the all the
birthday festivities stopped. I sat on his lap on the first
episode of Doctor Who started. And I think the the title
sequence and the music just drewus in immediately.
(13:01):
The first episode was called An Unearthly Child.
It was set in London and it featured William Hartnell as the
Doctor and Carol Ann Ford as theDoctor's granddaughter Susan.
And it was called An Unearthly Child.
The TARDIS had materialized in ain a scrap yard and Susan was
(13:25):
trying to put pass herself off as a secondary school student
and two teachers were very concerned about her welfare and
followed her to the scrap yard and were promptly whisked away
in the TARDIS back to the prehistoric era where they
encountered cave dwellers and. Were then essentially lost in
(13:51):
space. Not another famous TV series,
but they were lost in space and time, and they embarked on a
number of adventures with the Doctor Who and Susan.
So I think myself and my granddad were hooked from that
point and it became a ritual andtradition for us.
(14:13):
To be in his house at 5:15 everysingle Saturday to watch Doctor
Who all through the William Hartnell era and all through the
Patrick Trouten era. And he unfortunately died a
month or so after John Pertwee was announced as the new Doctor.
(14:34):
So he never got to see that era.But I carried on the tradition
and. Whenever I watch of it, I always
think fondly of him on his stories of Flash Gordon.
Yeah, I feel quite touched sometimes, just remembering how
we used to watch it and talk about the plots and it.
In those days, it always ended in a cliffhanger and we always
(14:57):
tried to guess what was going tohappen the following week.
And sometimes we were right, sometimes we got it completely
wrong. So it's a nice little memory.
But in terms of London, there's there's two series.
The really stuck stick in my mind.
So the first one was 1964 William Hartnell era Daleks
(15:21):
invasion of the F and it's the famous scene where the Daleks
appear on Westminster Bridge with the backdrop of the House
of Commons. They'd first met the Daleks on
The Planet of the Daleks, which was the second series after the
The Cave Dweller episode. They thought they'd been
defeated, but lo and behold, in the 22nd century the Daleks had
(15:45):
invaded and conquered the earth.It started, funnily enough, on
the 21st of November. It was the second series, so
quite near my birthday again. And it ended on Boxing Day, so
there was I think 6 episodes, so.
(16:07):
There there's the scenes on Westminster Bridge, there's the
scenes on the Riverside walkway at the side of Saint Thomas's
Hospital, and there's the reallyiconic scene of a Dalek rising
from the River Thames down at Hammersmith Bridge.
So it it was extremely popular and it was it made the front
(16:30):
page of lots of the newspapers because the publicity sorts
shots with the Daleks coming over the bridge.
Made really good front pages, soit was also the last episode
that Caroline Ford appeared in. There's a little bit of a love
story goes on in this episode. She falls in love with one of
(16:53):
the resistance fighters and she decides to stay in the 22nd
century to help rebuild the world.
After the Dialects have been defeated.
So it's quite a touching monologue by William Hartnell at
the end of that episode that people think in addition to
(17:15):
being part of the storyline was also his farewell to Caroline
Ford and. I remember watching it after she
left and always thinking, I wonder what she's doing now, as
if it really had happened. You know, I was, I used to
always. Yeah.
Just thinking, I wonder what she's doing back on Earth now.
And yeah, is she helping? And yeah, so it did seem very
(17:39):
real to me. But there was also a movie
version of the Daleks Invasion of the Earth with Peter Cushing,
famous Hammer horror actor, playing the role of the Doctor
that it was the 2nd movie. First movie was a recreation of
the planet of the dialects. The second one had Bernard
(18:00):
Cribbins in it as a policeman who gets transported to the
future with the Doctor on the the base of the Earth.
Resistance to the dialect is theEmbankment tube station, so they
go down into the Embankment and it's really tube stations.
That would be my second choice for a London.
(18:22):
Series, and that was in the Patrick Trouten era.
This went out in March 1968 and it was called the Web of Fear,
and it featured another type of robot called the Yeti, which the
Doctor had first encountered in Tibet.
(18:44):
And they looked like Abominable Snowman, but they were
mechanical. And in the Web of Fear, they and
Veddy invaded the London Underground system and the whole
of London was covered in a strange fungus looking web.
So it features Covent Garden, Good St.
Victoria Station amongst others.It is quite famous because at
(19:10):
one point only one episode had survived.
And then somebody found some sine reels in Nigeria and lo and
behold, another four episodes turned up.
So there's now five episodes of a six episode serial, The Web of
Fear. If anybody finds the final sixth
(19:35):
missing episode in their attic, I think they would be in for
quite a nice little bit of income from that.
Especially from yeah, the BBC who really keen to reverse what
they did in the 60s and tape over shows they really came to
try and relocate them and archive.
(19:55):
So that was confusion. I told him he isn't there.
Yeah, yeah. There's lots of very famous
series with that entire episodesmissing, just taped over, and
people never thought that these would become.
Classic series that that people would be interested in going
back and revisiting. So there's some of the the the
(20:21):
London focused ones, it's quite that really.
And you mentioned about London serving as a drop drop, a
backdrop for numerous Doctor Whoepisodes.
What about those iconic London landmarks though, that have made
appearances in the show, I mean on your walk, which I very much
enjoyed. I mean we we get to see the the,
(20:41):
the Houses of Parliament, don't we?
Across the the river like you doin the TV show.
Yeah, I mean the the Houses of Parliament and the clock tower
of Big Ben have have really featured in a lot of Doctor Who
episodes. So I've mentioned Invasion of
the Daleks, David Tennant's first appearance as Doctor Who.
(21:05):
The TARDIS is out of control andspinning through the sky, and it
knocks a big chunk of masonry off the Clock tower as it as it
flies to crash land further along the Thames.
So it's his first appearance comes about.
Then Peter Capaldi's first appearance has the House of
(21:26):
Parliament and Big Ben as a backdrop.
His is quite strange. It's set in the Victoria
Victorian era, but the walkway behind Saint Thomas's Hospital.
There is a Tyrannosaurus Rex prowling along there and it's
actually swallowed the TARDIS and then it coughs it up.
(21:50):
It shoots out like a piece of meat that might be stuck in
somebody's throat and goes spinning through the air.
And then Peter Capaldi makes hisdebut as as Doctor Who.
It's also been used by John Barrowman who famous for
(22:10):
musicals but also played CaptainJack in the Doctor Who series
and in one episode he tethers his spaceship to the tower of
Big Ben. So it's used quite a lot in
Doctor Who. The post office tower appears in
(22:34):
the movie, so it hadn't been long built and I think they
wanted something iconic to show it was London because the the
the premise is that the city hasbeen completely devastated by
the dialect invasion. Buildings are lying in rubble,
etcetera. But you still see the post
(22:56):
office tower in the background. So it's managed to survive and
probably it was the marker pointto say this is London in the
22nd century. Here's something you recognize.
Yeah, I think if you're talking about introducing the new Doctor
each time, you've got to providesomething familiar to the
(23:19):
audience if you're new as well. Coming home each time, yeah.
And in the old series, he quite often rematerialized inside the
Targets and you had no sense of where he was.
But the new one always seems to have some sort of iconic
landmark, whether it's London orelsewhere.
(23:40):
You can bring him in, yeah. The Shard and the London Eye
have also appeared inducted. The Shard was in The Bells of
St. John, where the great
Intelligence is in collusion with Miss Kislet, played by the
wonderful Celia Emery, and they're using the Wi-Fi system
(24:03):
to try and influence people's behavior.
It's the it's during the Matt Smith era and it's the episode
that introduces Jenna Louise Coleman as his new companion.
And she has appeared in the in the series before because Matt
(24:25):
Smith has been tracking her overdifferent periods of time.
So in past lives he's met her, but it's this version in the in
the 21st century that becomes his companion.
And Matt Smith said it's this isone of his favorite episodes
because he got to roar across Westminster Bridge and Waterloo
(24:49):
Bridge on a motorbike and it felt like he was in The Bourne
Identity and not in an episode of Doctor.
Which was also filmed around Waterloo.
Which was also felt around Waterloo.
Yeah, and then the real big one for people who like the new
series. Almost important.
As important as the 23rd of November 1963, the 26th of March
(25:12):
2005, Russell T Davis has finally persuaded the BBC to
relaunch Doctor Who and it relaunches at the London Eye.
So the London Eye has again beentaken over by an alien
intelligence, this time called the Nesting Consciousness, who
(25:36):
is in league with something called the Autumns, who can
animate shop dummies, and it introduces Billie Piper as Rose.
So a lot of the scenes are filmed again with House of
Commons in the background, but really the London Eye as the
(25:59):
main scene. And Russell T Davis was given
permission to add additional lighting to the London Eye so
that it looked even more bright in the night sky than it already
does. So it's a it's quite an
important sight for the new generation of Doctor Who fans.
(26:24):
That's where for them, really, it all started with Christopher
Eccleston and Billy Piper. That's just scary, isn't it?
It's also in the remake of Ghostbusters in 2016 and those
mannequins. It's just scary thoughts, yeah.
I mean, anything, anything that usually stands still and looks
(26:46):
lifeless, which then comes to life is quite terrifying.
And I think that's something Doctor Who does quite well, is
to scare adults and children. And again, it's something that
that has stuck with it throughout.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with being
scared, as long as you know thatit's fantasy and fiction.
(27:10):
And famously behind the couch ishow people describe watching
Doctor Who, isn't it? Yes, well, indeed.
My sister still watches Jaws when she has her feet up off the
floor, just in case. Now you mentioned a number of
areas, number of Doctor Who's and how.
(27:31):
I suppose my question is how hasthe portrayal of Doctor Who
changed over the years and is there a distinct difference
between the classic series and now this revised version?
Is there any big, big similarities or differences?
So I I think the the the original portrayal was a a
(27:54):
grandfatherly figure who was actually a grandfather to Susan.
He he wore a a Victorian frock coat.
He was a bit like the kind of stereotypical professor in a
science fiction story. He was quite grumpy.
(28:19):
Patrick Troughton actually turned to Charlie Chaplin for
his inspiration, so he wanted todifferentiate himself from
William Hartnell. So he kind of played him as a
little bit of a disheveled trampwho, while being highly
(28:42):
intelligent, kind of bumbled andbungled his way through things.
So he he had a different interpretation.
So, so I would say Hartnell was a grandfather, Patrick Trout and
was a mad uncle, and John Pertwee was more like a kind of
father figure to his companions.Yeah.
(29:04):
So I think it's really from Tom Baker onwards that it kind of
became a bit more eccentric, a bit more being on an equal
footing to the companions and a lot more outlandish outfits,
particularly in the three 1980s Doctors, Peter Davidson, Colin
(29:28):
Baker, they they they wore bright colors rather than the
dark colors that you'd seen previously.
So I I I think that was the big change.
I think that the change really in the new series is there's
been probably a lot more diversity.
(29:50):
So we've had our first woman Doctor Who, we're about to have
our first black Doctor Who. And again, when the series was
rebooted, Russell T Davis was quite keen that he had less of a
middle class feel about it. So Christopher Eccleston played
(30:12):
the Doctor with the northern accent and Billy Piper lived on
a council housing estate and wasa shop assist.
The housing estate, by the way, is in Lambeth, so it's the
Brandon housing estate. Many of the scenes from Doctor
Who were filmed there. It's just on the edge of
Kennington Park, although in theseries it's supposed to be
(30:34):
Peckham, which given the rivalrybetween Southwark and Lambeth
doesn't go down too well, but itthat the brand dynasty is very
definitely in Lambeth. Now you mentioned about Doctor
Who incorporating real thoughts,time, places and that also then
includes about real historical figures as well into the
(30:56):
stories. So what London historical
figures and events have been featured or referenced in the
series? Well, if you go back to the
original series, the executives at the BBC were extremely keen
that it should meet the Lord Wreath remit to entertain,
(31:16):
educate and inform. So they wanted not so many bug
eyed monsters and robots but forthe doctor to travel back in
time to historical periods. And the the reason they had two
(31:36):
school teachers was to make it give it the educational flavor.
So in the early years they went back in the first episode to The
Cave dwellers time. They also accompanied Marco Polo
on his voyages to China. They went to South America to
the Aztec period. They went to the French
(32:00):
Revolution and they went to the Battle of Culloden where Patrick
Trout and recruited his companion Jamie Mccrimmon who
was played by Fraser Hines, alsoknown for Emmerdale Farm but the
longest running so far, Doctor Who companion so.
So there was a big push to have historical factual series
(32:27):
counterbalancing the ones with monsters and aliens.
But really the second serial of the series was Planet of the
Daleks, and they just became so popular that the the monsters
and robots and creatures really took over.
(32:50):
And I think the ratio now over the 60 years is that 80% of
episodes have featured aliens, robots or monsters, and 20% are
purely historical. And you won't find a purely
historical episode. Now, Doctor Who will meet
(33:12):
historical characters, but there's always a monster lurking
in the background in the story line.
So some of the people, yeah, of course it couldn't be anything
less. So some of the people he's met,
HG Wells quite fittingly, Charles Dickens, Vincent van
(33:32):
Gogh, George Stevenson of the Railways fame are amongst the
people that that he's met. The two in the the most recent
series who've reoccurred quite afew times are Queen Victoria and
Winston Churchill. And both of them have have kind
of reappeared quite a few times in either in cameo roles or in
(33:58):
episodes where they are the central character.
And both of them are kind of involved in helping the Doctor
to defend the Earth against alien invasions in different
ways. The Churchill one, that is
really the main 1, So it's one of the scenes is on the roof of
(34:23):
the Churchill base in Whitehall and it looks across the
Parliament and you can see airships and dirigibles flying
over Parliament. The Doctor and Churchill
acknowledge each other because they've known each other for
many years. And Churchill tells the Doctor
(34:44):
I've acquired a weapon that can defeat the Nazis and Hitler.
And then he reveals the weapon and it turns out to be a Dalek.
So I think it it kind of reflects the nuclear weapons
Oppenheimer kind of storyline. If you have a weapon with such
(35:07):
devastating power, do you dare use it?
And the Doctor spends all the episode trying to convince
Churchill that it's not a very good idea to unleash a Dalek,
even though it might defeat Hitler.
And Hitler is In another storyline, the character River
(35:29):
Song, played by Alex Kingston, who is the Doctor's daughter.
Through quite a convoluted plot line, she is sent by another
alien back in time to kill Hitler, And that's a very
familiar science fiction trope. If you had the ability to travel
(35:51):
back in time, would you kill Hitler?
And if you did, what would the consequences be?
Might not. They might not all be good.
Yeah. They could be disastrous.
Yeah. Yeah, indeed.
Well, the last Indiana Jones whois going back to 1939, isn't it?
Yeah, that same same kind of thought.
(36:12):
So when you're talking about Doctor Who, a lot of the time
you're talking about London as well.
So they seem to have this symbiotic relationship.
How do you think that the city'sinfluenced the storytelling of
Doctor Who and vice versa? So I think it very clearly
influenced the original series because at the time World War
(36:39):
Two was still fresh in people's minds.
The Blitz was still fresh in people's minds.
You could walk through parts of London and still see bomb sites,
bomb ruins. So the the the idea that there
were alien forces ready to invade was within living memory.
(37:05):
And Terry Nation who who wrote the Daleks really based his idea
of these emotionless robots who want to exterminate everybody on
his recollection as a child of the the Nazis and and what he'd
heard on radio about their conduct and and the Blitz.
(37:28):
So I think the London you see inthe the early series is
obviously black and white television, quite grainy.
It didn't really matter whether you had people in rubber suits
and cardboard film sets, becauseyou probably couldn't see them
(37:49):
very well anyway on your screen.And I think that's really the
big difference, is that the original series was serialized,
so every story was 1/2 hour, ended on a cliffhanger and then
moved to the next part of the story.
(38:11):
And I think they could take their time to tell the story
much more slowly than the expectations of of today.
So, so you've got CGI, you've got HD television.
So they have to be really good with the special effects to to
(38:31):
achieve what used to be achievedreally with bits of string and
washing up bottles. But so I think the storytelling
has to be a lot quicker now. So whereas in the past they had
time over over probably 6 episodes per serial to develop
(38:54):
the characters and the storyline, if you watch it now,
it's very punchy. It jumps from scene to scene.
Sometimes you can hardly keep up, sometimes you have to watch
an episode twice to figure out what's going on.
And I think probably that reflects the London we live in
today where everything happens very quickly.
(39:16):
We've got access to Wi-Fi and Internet, we can find out
information really quickly, we get news very quickly.
So things change very rapidly. So for me that that is kind of
the the, the, the influence on of the current day situation on
(39:39):
the way Doctor Who is presented and that I think that probably
reflects back on on how people expect stories to be told
nowadays. So it's as a sci-fi writer, I
wouldn't write in the style of HG Wells today because that's
(39:59):
not what people expect. Yeah, they expect the action to
move quite quickly. They don't want pages and pages
of exposition or explanation, they just want to get on with
the story. So I think people's viewing and
reading attitudes have changed greatly since 1963 and no doubt
(40:23):
connected to the development of the Internet on live streaming
television, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And this whole like you can pause it if the door rings or et
cetera or you can, yeah, I mean.Yeah, I mean, if you missed an
episode of Doctor Who in 1963, that was it.
(40:44):
Unless the BBC decided to do a repeat.
So you could lose a bit of the plot because you've missed an
episode. Now you can just go back and get
it on BBC iPlayer and catch up whenever you feel like it.
So it's a bit like you've got your own time machine now, isn't
(41:05):
it? Oh, there you go.
See Time Machine in your own house?
Absolutely. Yeah.
So you mentioned about several Doctor Who episodes where the
the center around alien invasions in London.
How are these episodes in, in your view, play into or perhaps
challenge the British cultural attitudes and societal concerns,
(41:29):
you know invasion. We're an island, yeah.
I mean I think it does play to that and I think as I said the
the Daleks and the Nazis are arequite a good example.
You've also got the Cybermen, which are the second most
popular Doctor Who for, and they've got an equally famous
(41:55):
scene when they come down the steps of Saint Paul's in the
city, so they've got their iconic scene.
I think over the years the interpretation of that has
changed a bit. So Remembrance of the Dialects,
(42:16):
which was filmed in Waterloo, was written by Ben Aranovich,
who later went on to become quite famous for the Rivers of
London series. He was 23 when he wrote it.
So imagine that you get your first break in television and
you get to write the 25th anniversary episode of Doctor
(42:36):
Who. So in In Remembrance of the
Daleks, in his novelization he gets the opportunity to explore
racism quite a bit. So in in the in the TV series,
there is a former member of Oswald Mosley's Black Shirts
(42:58):
who's in league with the Daleks,and he gets to explore that a
bit more with the Doctor's companion Ace, played by Sophie
Aldred, who was born in Greenwich.
And there is a little backdrop to a story where she's quite
(43:19):
attracted to one of the soldiers, but then finds out
that he is in league with the member of the Black Shirts.
And this triggers for us her a memory of his girlfriend who is
Indian and had faced quite a severe racial attack.
(43:41):
So I think as society has moved on, the storylines in Doctor Who
quite often pick up on on those things and certainly the
terrorism attacks of the past few years kind of reflect a lot
of people's concerns. So quite often when you when you
(44:05):
see things exploding in Doctor Who, there'll be a storyline
attached to why that is happening.
It can lead to the wrong interpretation.
We've obviously got quite a lot going on at the moment about
migrants and refugees and and and flooding the country and all
(44:28):
sorts of things being said aboutthat.
So I I think the the Doctor Who series is quite good at
addressing this and the thing that I think is absolutely
brilliant is that the next Doctor Who Shetty Gatwa, came to
this country as a 2 year old refugee from the Romanden
(44:51):
massacre. He made his home in Dundee.
So a refugee is now going to become the most iconic character
on British TV. So I I think that is really an
excellent decision for the 60th anniversary and really reflects
(45:11):
the multicultural society that we live in.
And if we move away from the screen, Doctor Who and we move
more into the cultural fabric through fan clubs, conventions
and even museum exhibits. Can you speak about these,
(45:33):
especially with the role in London's cultural music?
So I think obviously 10 years ago we had the 50th anniversary.
We've now got the 60th, 1:00. So it comes to the forefront at
those periods of time. But at any given time there will
be something connected to DoctorWho going on, whether it's an
(45:57):
exhibition, a film showing at the BFI, a meeting of a Doctor
Who convention, that there's always something going on.
And really, I think that's why when it was cancelled in 1989,
it survived because there was novels, there was audio plays
(46:18):
and really the Doctor Who fan base kept it alive.
So there is some quite unusual things.
So the Vauxhall Tavern, famous LGBTQI venue, famous for its
drag shows, they regularly have what's called the Gallifrey
(46:42):
Cabaret, and Gallifrey is the planet that Doctor Who comes
from. And they have a TARDIS on stage
and there's all sorts of shenanigans involving Cybermen
and and other creatures dancing to disco music.
So, so even in that that sort ofaspect, it seeps its way into
(47:05):
the culture. A Doctor Who is quite big in the
gay community. Russell T Davis famously was the
director and writer of Queer as Folk and John Barrowman played
the first bisexual character andBill Potts, the companion, was
(47:26):
the first openly gay companion. So it's it's got quite a strong
relationship with the gay community.
And the other thing really that is sadly missed is the Museum of
the Moving Image, which used to be on the South Bank.
They had Daleks, Tartices, all sorts of monster costumes on
(47:50):
display, and they had an extremely popular exhibition
called Behind the Sofa. But the BFI itself has got the
Doctor Who archives, so they've got the scripts of almost every
series in serial, and you can access them through the
archives. They've got some of the series,
(48:14):
some of the films, they've got books and academic papers on
Doctor Who. So it's well worth joining the
Rubin Library at the BFI if you're interested in finding out
more. There is obviously the Doctor
Who shop in Upton Park. Quite difficult to find if you
(48:37):
don't know the area, but definitely people find their way
there and they've got all sorts of Doctor Who memorabilia there
that you can buy and also a little Doctor Who museum.
So plenty of things you can do, but a couple of things that are
really interesting to me are theDalek builders.
(49:00):
So some people restore motorbikes and vintage cars.
These guys build Daleks from scratch to the specifications
from Doctor Who and they look really impressive and they turn
up village fates and and shop openings and stuff like that.
So, but honestly, if you see them, you wouldn't be able to
(49:22):
differentiate by something that that's made in the BBC Props
workshop. There's also the collectors of
memorabilia. So there's lots of things that
have come out of the show. Dalek models, Airfix models,
jigsaws. One of the ones that really
(49:42):
interests me because I actually remember buying these is the
candy cigarettes produced by Cadet Sweets called Doctor Who
and the Daleks. So you would get 10 little candy
cigarettes and you would get a card and the card would be a
little section of a Doctor Who story.
(50:04):
So there was two series 50 cards, and if you collect them,
there was a narrative on the reverse side.
And on the front side there was an illustration to go with that
narrative. So if anybody has a collection
of series one and series two of the Cadet sweets, candy,
(50:26):
cigarettes, Doctor Who and the Dialects collection, again I
think they could make themselvesa nice little bit of income from
that. So I think it's influenced loads
of things in London and in widerUK culture.
And if someone were to take yourDoctor Who tour in Waterloo,
(50:50):
what are the key takeaways you hope they'd gain with regarding
the show's history and its relationship with London?
Well, I think firstly the real and important connections
between the show and Waterloo. Three major episodes were filmed
in the area. The BBC workshop where the
(51:14):
Daleks were invented is in the area and the designer of the
Daleks, Ray Cusack is a lamb with born Boy and one of the
voices of the Daleks, Peter Hawkins who came up with the
(51:39):
Exterminate You will be the Daleks.
He was born in Lambeth and he also was the voice of Bill and
Ben, the Flower Pot men and all the voices in the Captain
Pugwash series. Yeah, what a talent. 2 doctors
were born in Lambeth, one of them in Waterloo.
(52:03):
So that there is a lot of connections and a lot of history
with the series in Doctor Who. So I think I would like people
to think about the locations andthe innovations linked to the
series, but not only that, at each stop to get a sense of the
(52:24):
wider history of the area, the places we're looking at, because
there is a lot of history in Waterloo.
It's quite a touristy area now, but it has an industrial past.
It has a past where it was completely devastated during the
(52:46):
Blitz. It also has the connections to
the Battle of Waterloo, with Waterloo Bridge being named
after that battle and then giving its name to the station,
which then in turn gives its name to the area.
And perhaps one of the most important things is the Festival
of Britain 1951, a celebration of British innovation with lots
(53:10):
of sci-fi things. They they had a satellite dish
that bounced messages of the moon.
They had the Dome of Discovery and the pioneered 3D Cinema
1951. We think we're quite modern now.
We go to the iMac Cinema, we puton our 3D glasses and watch a
(53:34):
blockbuster. Well, they were doing that on
the South Bank in 1951. So I think those would be the
kind of things I would like people to bring away.
Sense of the history of Doctor Who, but also a sense of the
history of Waterloo. Yeah, fantastic.
And we've also got an episode about Festival of Britain, so
I'll include that in the in the show nights for everybody to
(53:57):
listen to as well. And so 54.
So David, thank you very much for for that.
I mean, you can really get down to the detail, but the walk is
very good because a it's a beautiful walk anyway and
there's lots of things for you to to learn and put in and
behind the scenes, but that's the bit because I'm really nosy
like that. So for anybody wanting to book a
(54:19):
walking tour with David, he doespublic guided walks.
The dates for the start of two 2024 are already up.
So you can book individual tickets for that, but also
private tours are available as well.
Thank you, David. Appreciate it.
Thank you. And I look forward to guiding
people through time and relativedimensions.
(54:42):
That's all for now. Until next time.
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