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A History of Doctor Who on BBC tv and radio 1963 to 2004
Part 1

BBC tv

Early years

The original home of Doctor Who was BBC tv, as the BBC's one and only TV station at the time was called. BBC tv broadcasted from Alexandra Palace in London from 1936 up to the onset of World War 2 in September 1939. It is interesting to note that the first ever Science Fiction broadcast by BBC tv was of a play by Karel Capek called RUR in 1938.

In common with all contemporary programmes RUR was broadcast live and no recordings exist of this television landmark. Pre-war broadcasts were, however, short lived, the BBC abruptly switched off TV transmitters just after noon on the 1st of September 1939, two days before the outbreak of war. Transmissions were not resumed until 1946.

Independent Television

From 1946 to 1955 BBC tv was the only UK TV station, a far cry from today's multi-channel Television. Its commercial rival, ITV (Independent Television), began broadcasting in 1955 and quickly became a strong competitor to the BBC, often gaining far higher ratings for it's diet of variety programmes, comedy and drama.

It was from ITV that many of those responsible for the creation of Doctor Who would come, most notably Sydney Newman (Head of Drama) and Verity Lambert (Producer).

Quatermass

The BBC had gained some notable, and well remembered, success in the 1950's with the ground breaking broadcast of the three Nigel Kneale penned Quatermass serials, The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1957).

However on the whole the BBC was seen as being more 'high brow', less populist and a little more 'staid' than ITV. It certainly stayed true to the first two principles of it's first Director General Sir John Reith who said that the principles of the BBC were to "inform, educate and to entertain".

Changes

The creation of Doctor Who in 1963 was just one sign of changes at the BBC, many of these instigated by Newman himself. Another change was to come a few short months after the first transmission of Doctor Who on November the 23rd 1963.

On April 21st 1964 the BBC gained a second Channel, BBC 2. As a result the older channel was given, what would today be called a re-branding, and became BBC 1.

BBC 1

BBC 1 was born (or should that be re-born?) on the 20th April 1964, between Episodes 2 and 3 of The Keys of Marinus. Doctor Who would stay on this channel for the rest of it's original run, until the final episode of Survival in December 1989 and return for the 1996 Television Movie starring Paul McGann.

The new channel was re-positioned as the more populist of the two BBC tv channels and was often seen as a more direct rival to ITV than the old BBC tv channel had been. This said, it still retained it's remit to educate and the expand the mind so included a mix of programming from popular drama to documentaries and news.

Tea time telly

Doctor Who fitted well into this mix and was particularly well placed in the schedules at Saturday teatime until moved in the 1980's.

In 1982 (Season 19) the programme was moved to a twice weekly slot in which, although the days it was broadcast on changed, it stayed in until 1986 (Season 23), when it moved back to Saturdays for a year. After this, and until the end of it's original run in 1989, it moved back to weekday slots, scheduled opposite the UK's then top Soap Opera, ITV's Coronation Street.

Colour

For almost all of the 1960's BBC 1 like BBC tv before it was a black and white, 405 line, service. This changed in November 1969 when, 625 line PAL, colour transmissions were officially introduced to BBC 1.

On the 3rd of January 1970 Jon Pertwee's debut story, Spearhead from Space, became the first Doctor Who story to be made, and transmitted, in colour.

This innovation was but the first to affect Doctor Who and by the end of the 1980's Doctor Who was also transmitted in Nicam stereo for those with the correct equipment.

Since 1998 BBC 1 has also been available on digital widescreen (16:9) terrestrial, satellite and cable. These services can only be received by those with the correct receiving and decoding equipment.

Anniversary

From the end of it's regular run on BBC 1, in 1989, Doctor Who was mostly seen as repeats on BBC 2 with a few important exceptions.

In 1993 BBC 1 celebrated the programme's 30th Anniversary with a repeat run of the Pertwee story Planet of the Daleks and a number of special 5 minute shorts and an hour long documentary 30 Years in the Tardis. The next appearance of the programme on BBC 1 came almost three years later.

He's back...

The last original full length Doctor Who story broadcast on BBC 1, until the new 2005 series, was the 1996 Paul McGann Television Movie (TVM), simply called Doctor Who. This was made in co-production with the US Company Universal Television and shown on the US Fox Network on Tuesday May the 14th. However, the TVM was actually first broadcast in Canada on the 12th of May 1996 and later in the UK on the 27th of May.

This was not the first time that a Doctor Who story had not been broadcast first in the UK, 1993's 90 minute 20th Anniversary Special The Five Doctors was first shown on PBS stations in the USA on the programmes actual anniversary, the 23rd of November 1983. It was shown on BBC 1 two days later, at 7.20pm on the 25th of November, as part of the BBC's Children in Need appeal.

I'll explain later...

It was another telethon style appeal that brought us Doctor Who's last original appearance on BBC 1 in the 1990's, and in the Twentieth Century. In 1999 Comic Relief announced that they were making a Doctor Who special, The Curse of Fatal Death, with Rowan Atkinson as 'The Doctor'.

The Curse of Fatal Death was eventually shown in 4 parts and ran to 22 minutes, almost the length of the old 25 minute episodes. It was intended as an affectionate 'skit" that would take an amusing, alternative, take on the good Doctor and his universe of alien enemies and time travel.

The sketch included Jonathon Price as the Master and a rather a lot of Daleks, as well as appearances by many well known actors and actresses including Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Joanna Lumley. Most fans loved it, some didn't really get it, but whatever the opinion of the fans it was clear that the general public, and the Comic Relief crew, still held the programme in great affection.

New Millennium, new beginning

As the BBC and BBC 1 moved into the multi-channel digital future in the late 1990's and early 2000's it might have been thought that an 'old' programme such as Doctor Who was past it's sell by date but by the middle of the first decade of the new millennium a new series will have materialised back on BBC 1 and, if rumours are to be believed, back on Saturday evenings as part of a revamped BBC weekend lineup.

On the 30th of December 2003 BBC 1 aired a special retrospective programme for the 40th anniversary (although they were over a month late - the actual anniversary being the 23rd of November), The Story of Doctor Who revelled in the past of the series with classic clips and interviews with luminaries from the series' history.

Whilst 2004 may have been quiet on BBC 1 for Doctor Who 2005 promises to be the opposite with the return of the programme as a flagship 13 part BBC series starring Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper. Already garnering frenzied press and magazine coverage the new series looks set to redefine our view of the programme for the 21st Century.

BBC 2

Birth

BBC 2 began broadcasting on April 21st 1964 as the second BBC tv Channel. It's aim was, and is, to provide programming that is more diverse than BBC 1 and to cater for minority tastes and interests.

In 1967 BBC 2 become the first UK television channel to launch a regular colour service, prior to this it had broadcast in black and white. The BBC's experience with introducing colour to BBC 2, as well as 625 line broadcasts, allowed them to test both before rolling them out together to BBC 1 in November 1969. In common with BBC 1, BBC 2 now offers digital widescreen (16:9) transmissions to those with the correct equipment.

Lively Arts

Doctor Who's history on BBC 2 goes back to 1977 and the Lively Arts documentary, Whose Doctor Who, presented by Melvyn Bragg. This offered a rather academic assessment of the programmes impact up to the time of broadcast and was most notable for it's inclusion of behind the scenes footage and interviews from the making of The Talons of Weng-Chiang. A story viewed by many fans as being a classic and incidentally the final story to be produced by Philip Hinchcliffe, perhaps the most successful of all Doctor Who producers, cetainly in terms of critical acclaim.

Repeats

From 1977 onwards BBC 2 has been the venue of a number of repeat seasons and other documentaries. In 1991 the previously unaired Pilot Episode was shown as part of the BBC 2 Lime Grove Commemoration. The pilot episode, in common with other Doctor Who in the 1960's had been made at the BBC's Lime Grove studios. The studios finally closed their doors in 1991 hence the commemorative nature of the programming.

The Pilot itself had been re-shot as the result of a rather disaster prone shoot, including banging TARDIS doors and a lot more!

Talking anoraks

The following year BBC 2 aired a major repeat season that started with a special half-hour documentary Resistance is Useless.

Amusingly this half-hour nostalgia fest was presented by a talking anorak, this made some fans very uneasy! The repeats started with Hartnell and continued through each Doctor up to the then final incarnation, Sylvester McCoy. This Season continued until May 1993 and later that year the Doctor was back, in repeat and documentary form, on BBC 1 for the 30th anniversary.

A night of Who

After this there was a resumed series of repeats but perhaps the most high-profile Doctor Who event of the 1990's on BBC 2 was November 1999's Doctor Who Night, over three hours of programming presented by Fourth Doctor Tom Baker.

This event even merited a special Radio Times cover which featured a Dalek and a number of articles inside the magazine, it was also well covered by the UK press.

Cut short

The Night was followed by a short repeat season which ended up showing three stories, Spearhead from Space (Pertwee), Doctor Who and the Silurians (Pertwee) and Genesis of the Daleks (Tom Baker), this was despite the fact a longer season was originally planned.

The repeat season was somewhat abruptly curtailed in March 2000 and it remains to be seen if we will see any more classic Doctor Who on BBC 2 in the coming years or if it will be the digital channels BBC 3 and BBC 4 that will in future carry the flag for the classic series.

BBC Choice/BBC 3

More choice from the Beeb

BBC Choice launched at midday on September 23rd 1998 - as a free to air digital channel it was, and is, only available via digital terrestrial, satellite and cable.

Choice was one of a number of new Digital channels launched by the BBC at this time, these included BBC News 24 and BBC Knowledge. It was the first new general entertainment channel from the BBC in over thirty years, News 24 and Knowledge were specifically themed and showed, respectively, rolling news and educational programmes and documentaries.

As with almost all new UK Digital channels Choice, News 24 and Knowledge were broadcast in widescreen (16:9) as are the digital versions of BBC 1 and BBC 2.

35 years

In November 1998, a mere two months after launch, Choice showed a week of themed Doctor Who programming, The Take: Doctor Who, to celebrate the programmes 35th Anniversary. This met with a mixed reaction from fans given that most were unable to receive the channel, the decoding boxes needed to receive the channel having only just become available.

The general public were in the same position too, the take up of digital being fairly slow at this time, not least because much of the equipment was difficult to find.

For the more cynical fan the placing of the 35th anniversary programming on Choice was seen as an attempt by the BBC to sideline the programme and keep celebrations off the 'main' BBC channels.

Leaving this aside the fact that the BBC were celebrating the anniversary at all was to be applauded and, despite having a relatively small budget, BBC Choice presented a week of interesting and varied programming with, in total, nine hours of Doctor Who repeats, documentaries, interviews and reports from the 1998 Panopticon fan convention. All this was presented in inimitable style by Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy.

Walking with (rubber) dinosaurs

To the surprise and, again, the frustration of non-digital fans, BBC Choice announced that in October 1999 they would be showing a night of Dinosaur related programming which would include a repeat showing of the Season 11 Pertwee story Invasion of the Dinosaurs.

Interestingly this theme night seemed to be an attempt by the Choice to tap in to the success of the excellent BBC 1 programme Walking with Dinosaurs. A programme that brought state of the art CGI Dinosaurs to the TV screens of the UK (eat your heart out Steven Spielberg - they were honestly as good if not better than the ones in Jurassic Park - I kid you not!).

The only down side to Choice's strategy was that it didn't take brilliant eyesight to notice that the 1974 Doctor Who dinosaurs weren't quite up to the standards of Walking with Dinosaurs! To fans though this didn't matter because Choice had also mentioned that Episode 1 was an upgraded version and episode three contained previously unseen footage.

That was the last time Doctor Who was seen on the BBC Choice apart from the odd mention of a returned episode or new series rumour in the Liquid News showbiz magazine strand.

Relaunch

Choice was replaced on the second of March 2002 by the new channel BBC 3, those of you who remember Season 8 story The Daemons may also remember that the TV crew covering the dig at the Devils Hump were from a channel named BBC 3, a case of fiction becoming fact?

Confidential Who

Nothing has been seen of the series on Three since, classic repeats and mentions of the programme are now more frequently seen on BBC 4, but in October 2004 news broke in Broadcast magazine that the BBC plan to produce a companion series to the new 2005 Doctor Who series.

This will be a thirteen part documentary strand titled Doctor Who Confidential and will feature behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with cast members as well as "archive [footage] of previous Time Lords". The programme will air on BBC 3 immediately after the main series airs on BBC 1.

BBC Knowledge/BBC 4

From Knowledge to Four

BBC Knowledge began broadcasting almost seven months after BBC Choice in June 1999, as the companion digital tv service to BBC Choice and was aimed at a slightly less populist (in BBC terms) audience than Choice.

Knowledge was a fairly short lived channel and was replaced on March the second 2002 by BBC 4. The creation of BBC 3 and BBC 4 was part of the BBC's more aggressive strategy to compete in the digital marketplace and included a number of other channels targeted at specific audiences: BBC News 24 (news), BBC Parliament (politics and parliament), CBBC (children) and CBeebies (pre-school children).

BBC 4 was backed by higher funding levels and a remit to originate more unique programming of it's own whereas Knowledge, and Choice for that matter, had relied more on repeats and second hand programming for the meat of their output.

Time shifts

Four was launched in a high profile simulcast with BBC 2 and from the start it was clear that the channel would offer some unique, thought provoking and valuable programming some of which would be of great interest to fans of classic British science fiction and fantasy.

Amongst the most notable programmes on Four have been excellent documentaries, many a part of the excellent Time Shift strand, covering the work of Nigel Kneale (The Kneale Tapes), the BBC Radiophonic workshop (Alchemists of Sound) and the 'golden age' of fantasy TV in the 1960's (Fantasy 60's). The latter two documentaries included substantial mentions of Doctor Who and included clips from the programme.

Four has also been notable in running themed seasons of vintage repeats and accompanying documentaries and in July 2004 ran a month long 60's season which included repeats of the documentaries mentioned above as well as a broadcast of the orphaned first episode of The Web of Fear, the first time since it's original airing in 1968.

 

[click here to go to part 2 of this article - BBC radio and BBC Online/BBCi]

 

 

 

 

 

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