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

After five days of rehearsing, the cast were ready to go before the electronic cameras for the recording of the first episode of Doctor Who, which took place on Friday 27th September 1963 - exactly 50 years ago today.

Later known as the pilot episode, this recording was intended to be shown as the first episode of the new series.

Doctor Who was to be recorded in Studio D at Lime Grove in west London. Opened in 1914 by the Gaumont Film Company, Lime Grove was a film studio converted for television. Bought by the BBC in 1950, it would be home to some of the nation's most-loved programmes for over 40 years.

Studio D was 5,300 sq ft, about 83ft x 64ft. Long-running series broadcast from here included What's My Line?, Sooty, Dixon of Dock Green, Blue Peter, Steptoe and Son, whose theme was composed by Ron Grainer, and Britain's first soap, The Grove Family, which took its title family from the studios, was created and written by Jon Pertwee's father and elder brother, Roland and Michael, and whose cast included Peter Bryant.

Television production in the 1960s followed a strict pattern. Overnight, the sets for Doctor Who were rigged following the plans drawn up by the designer, Peter Brachacki. Over half the studio was taken up with the interior of the Doctor's time and space ship, the TARDIS. Built by freelance contractors Shawcraft Models (Uxbridge) Ltd, the set featured a large hexagonal unit strung from the ceiling. The main console took up a large space, consisting of six instrument panels and a pulsating central column. Other sets included the school classroom and the junkyard, which featured the TARDIS prop.

Once the sets were rigged they needed to be lit. Television lighting is a skilled art which takes years of training and experience. Sam Barclay was assigned to light the episode, having just finished working on the drama Jane Eyre. As well as creating the atmosphere of the show, the lighting director also needs to make sure the characters are correctly lit by careful positioning of key lights and back lights.

Camera rehearsals took place in the afternoon. The show would be recorded as live, with just one camera break at the point the crew entered the TARDIS. This was the first time the studio crew would have a chance to run through the complete show. The senior representatives of the crew would have attended the final rehearsal the previous day and made notes to pass on to their teams. The director, Waris Hussein, supplied a camera script, with all the shots he would require listed by shot number. However, it was not until the crews started rehearsing with the cast that the pieces started to come together. In a small studio such as Lime Grove, everyone needed to be totally aware of what they should be doing, from camera operators and cable bashers, to sound boom operators, to floor managers and assistants who were responsible for making sure everyone on the studio floor was where they should be.

In the studio gallery the vision mixer, Clive Doig, would need to make sure he knew exactly which camera to cut to the recording line at each point, guided by the production assistant who would call out the camera shots. The sound supervisor, Jack Clayton, would make sure the right microphones were faded up and would mix in the special music and effects played in by the grams operator at the back of the sound booth. The technical manager would need to make sure all equipment was running correctly and in the lighting gallery all cameras were constantly adjusted to ensure they produced pictures of the same quality. Co-ordinating everything was the director. Because the show had to be recorded as live, it was essential that everything was rehearsed as much as possible to reduce the possibility of mistakes.

The cast were made up by the make-up department headed by Elizabeth Blattner, and William Hartnell was fitted with his wig. Costumes were supervised by Maureen Heneghan.

After a supper break the recording of that first episode began, with the first person to step in front of a camera being Fred Rawlings playing a policeman who, while on night beat amid mist and as a clock bell is heard to strike three times, shines his torch over the gates of a scrap merchant called I. M. Foreman, at 76 Totter's Lane . . .

It is difficult to imagine the pressures in the studio as the team brought that first episode to life. For such an innovative drama, though, problems were inevitable. The recording for that pilot episode is available to watch in full on The Beginning DVD box set. One of the biggest problems was with the doors on the interior of the TARDIS set. They refused to close and can be seen flapping open behind the main characters. Because of the problem, Hussein made the decision to retake the final half of the show. The section from the break where the crew entered the TARDIS to the end of the episode was performed again, this time to the satisfaction of the director and producer.
It had been a long process but, to the relief of Hussein and Lambert, the first episode was now in the can. It would be shown to the bosses the following week. The cost of the recording session was later estimated to have been £2,143, 3 shillings, and 4 pence (£2,143.17).

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

With the first scripts now complete and work well under way on the titles and music for the new series, the cast and crew began the start of the long process of turning the thoughts and ideas of the production team into a television play.

It was on Thursday 19th September, exactly 50 years ago today, that the first dramatic filming for an episode of Doctor Who took place.

In the days before video editing, complicated sequences, or items that required a lot of setting up, would always be recorded on to film. Film was a much more flexible medium than video tape, primarily because it could be easily edited.

Film was also used for sequences that needed a large set, one that would not be practical in the confines of a television studio. It was used for sequences that would not be allowed in an electronic studio, such as those involving fire or water.

The downside of film production was the cost. It was more expensive than video recording and took much longer to produce. Camera set-ups and lighting took time and sequences had to be repeated many times to get the required shots. Film then had to be developed and edited before it was transmittable.

Any film sequences needed to be complete before the studio session took place in the electronic studio, as film insets needed to be played through the studio, in real time, to become part of the complete recording. For the first episode of Doctor Who just one film sequence was needed: the shot at the very end of the episode when the TARDIS is seen having landed in prehistoric times, being overlooked by the shadow of a human.

One actor was required for this, and Leslie Bates provided the shadow of the caveman overlooking the TARDIS after it had landed, thus becoming the first actor to have his image recorded for Doctor Who, albeit only as a shadow and uncredited.

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The following day, the four principal cast members met at BBC Television Centre at 3pm to take part in a photocall for Radio Times. A small mock-up of the junkyard set and the classroom had been rigged, and it was hoped by the production team that the series would be awarded the cover of the relevant Radio Times, but this was not confirmed.


It was the first time the four cast members had met, and Carole Ann Ford remembers her feelings on the day:

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The next day, on Saturday 21st September 1963, that first TARDIS team met in a West London hall, where they would begin the very first rehearsals for the very first episode of Doctor Who.

The location was the Drill Hall at 117 Walmer Road, London, W2. The part of Walmer Road where the local Territorial Army base once stood no longer exists. The street was split in half during the late-1960s to allow a new housing project to be built, and the location where those first tentative rehearsals took place - and where Doctor Who was first brought to life - now lies in Kingsdown Close, the site occupied by a block of flats sandwiched between the Hammersmith and City Underground Line and the Westway.

Any drama had to be recorded in as near to real time as possible. Although it was accepted that a drama as complex as Doctor Who would need some recording breaks, these were very limited and had to be agreed with the programme's producer. A thorough rehearsal of each episode was needed to ensure that each recording proceeded as seamlessly as possible.
While the cast were establishing their characters, decisions were being taken on the running order of the series. By mutual consent, David Whitaker and Anthony Coburn agreed that Coburn's story The Robots should swap places in the series running order with the Terry Nation story, originally planned to be fifth in the series run. The main reason was that the scripts for The Robots were still not finished, while Nation's scripts were ready. Design work needed to be started on the story.

Looking much further forward, it was now decided to complete the first year's run with two seven-part stories and one four-part story. Nation was commissioned to write one of the seven-part stories, The Red Fort, which would be set during the Indian Mutiny.

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

Production on the new series was progressing. The main cast were under contract, scripts were being finalised, and work was well under way on the title sequence.

An experimental session, testing new electronic effects for the series, had originally been planned for Friday 19th July, and it finally took place on Friday 13th September 1963, exactly 50 years ago today.

The place was Lime Grove Studio D, the studio which would become the main home of Doctor Who for its first few years of production. The main purpose of the day was to try to achieve an effect of the Doctor's spaceship, the TARDIS, dematerialising. The TARDIS prop had been built in the shape of a Metropolitan Police box, as specified in the script by Anthony Coburn. Police boxes were a common sight in 1960s London, with more than 650 in the capital. They played an important role in police work, providing a means of communication in the days long before the two-way radio. Designed by Metropolitan Police Surveyor Gilbert MacKenzie Trench in 1929 specially for the London police, the boxes were made of concrete with a door of teak. The interiors of the boxes normally contained a stool, a table, brushes and dusters, a fire extinguisher, and a small electric heater.

The replica, built by the BBC, was made of wood. On arrival at the studios on the morning of 13th, though, it was found that the prop was too big to fit into the service lift needed to transport it to the studio on the fourth floor.

One of the crew assigned to the studio that day was Dave Mundy, who remembers:
Meanwhile, after the months of behind-the-scenes work that had so far been carried out on Doctor Who, details of the new series were finally beginning to be released to the public for the first time. The BBC had held a launch for its autumn television season with Controller of Programmes Stuart Hood in Blackpool on September 12th 1963, and the following day a report on the event and the new season's shows appeared in The Times newspaper. The article mainly concentrated on the return of the controversial satirical series That Was The Week That Was, but at the end mentioned in passing:
While only a small acknowledgement in a report on a whole season's worth of programming, this is believed to be one of the first mentions - if not the first mention - of Doctor Who in the media.

Progress was being made on the scripts for the new series. The launch date had now been delayed for a further week and the show would now debut on Saturday 23rd November 1963.

On Monday 16th September, script editor David Whitaker updated the production team on the latest running order for the first few months of the show. The first three stories were unchanged. The series would begin with Tribe of Gum, followed by The Robots, and A Journey to Cathay. A story based on miniaturising the crew, favoured by Whitaker, was now slotted in at number four and had been assigned to author Robert Gould.

The fifth slot was now assigned to Terry Nation's story The Mutants. It had been commissioned by Whitaker after Nation submitted a storyline entitled The Survivors about a race of aliens who had survived an apocalyptic war. Nation's agent, Beryl Vertue, the future mother-in-law of showrunner Steven Moffat, had succeeded in negotiating a higher-than-usual fee for the writer and he was paid £262 per episode.

The sixth story had now been allocated to another established writer, Malcolm Hulke, who had proposed two stories for the series. One, The Hidden Planet, featured a world identical to Earth but hidden on the opposite side of the Sun. The other, the one that was accepted, was set in Roman Britain, just before the departure of the occupying forces.

Rex Tucker, who had been due to share directing duties with Waris Hussein, had left for a holiday in Majorca and it was decided he would not return to the project. Tucker had never been happy working on Doctor Who and it was agreed that when he returned from holiday he would move to other projects. In his place the young but experienced staff director Christopher Barry was pencilled in to direct the second and sixth stories of the series. Richard Martin was assigned the fourth.

Whitaker set out his thoughts about the series as follows:
Doctor Who Story Plan

• Tribe of Gum: Written by Anthony Coburn. Directed by Waris Hussein
Four Episodes. The story begins the journey and takes the travellers back to 100,000BC and Palaeolithic man. In this story the 'ship' is slightly damaged and forever afterward is erratic in certain sections of its controls.
• The Robots: Written by Anthony Coburn. Directed by Christopher Barry
Six Episodes. This story takes the travellers to somewhere in the 30th Century, forward to the world when it is inhabited only by robots.
• A Journey to Cathay: Written by John Lucarotti. Directed by Waris Hussein
Seven Episodes. The travellers join the explorer Marco Polo on his Journey to Cathay.
• Miniscules [sic] story. Written by Robert Gould. Directed by Richard Martin
Four Episodes. The TARDS transports Doctor Who back to 1963 but reduced in size to one sixteenth of an inch.
• The Mutants. Written by Terry Nation. Directed by Waris Hussein
Seven Episodes. The TARDIS crew land on a planet inhabited by survivors of an atomic war.
• Story Six: Written by Malcolm Hulke. Directed by Christopher Barry
Six Episodes. The travellers are set down in AD400 where the Romans are just about to leave Britain. The crew are involved in a struggle at a time when the blank pages of history occur, in an adventure full of excitement and action.

With a pilot planned for recording on Friday 27th September, work had been completed on the score for the first story. The incidental music was written by Norman Kay, a well-known television and film composer. The music was performed by a group of seven musicians and recorded at the Camden Theatre on the evening of Wednesday 18th September.

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

Production on the new series was progressing. The main cast were under contract and being measured for costumes and make-up.

It was on Tuesday 20th August 1963 - exactly 50 years ago today - that Doctor Who had its first studio session.

The place was Stage 3A of the BBC's television studios in Ealing, and the event was testing for what would become the iconic Doctor Who title sequence. The designer assigned was Bernard Lodge and the inspiration for the design came from a piece of 35mm film obtained by Verity Lambert. The film had been created for the children's production of Tobias and the Angel, made in 1960, and featured a howl-round effect that impressed Lambert.


The use of howl-round as an effect had been pioneered in the late Fifties by Norman Taylor, a BBC technical operations manager on Crew 9 based at Lime Grove in London. He discovered, while experimenting with a camera looking at a monitor showing its own picture, the effect of diminishing images into limbo.
Lambert would later ask permission for Taylor to be given a credit for his work on the series. Although this was rejected by Taylor's Head of Department, R W Bayliff, Taylor was given a Technical Suggestion award of £25 for his idea.


In 2011, Palmer recalled how Taylor had brought the effect to him in his role as an Investigations Engineer, responsible for developing new operational techniques:
It was this film sequence for Tobias and the Angel that had caught the attention of Lambert and which she showed to Lodge as the type of effect she would like for the opening of her new drama series. The sequence impressed Lodge and he suggested feeding the letters from the Doctor Who title into the sequence.

Clive South, who was part of the technical team, recalls that TC3 was used to create the effect which was recorded on to film at Lime Grove. He said:
Hugh Sheppard, who was on camera for the session, recalls Taylor lighting matches to trigger the howl-round.

Geoff Higgs, who was working in videotape in 1963, talked about some of the complications in recording the sequence:
Lodge used just one part of the old Tobias and the Angel footage: the very start, the opening line that comes up and then breaks away. Everything else was new.

Complete with the Ron Grainer music, realised by Delia Derbyshire and Dick Mills, the opening sequence would become one of the most memorable and inspired in the history of British television.

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

Production is now well under way on the new science-fiction series, the main actors had been cast and issued with their contracts.

It was clear to the production team that a vital element of the new drama's success would be the title music and special sounds. On Monday 12th August, exactly 50 years ago today, director Waris Hussein contacted the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to discuss the requirements for the first episode of Doctor Who.

The Radiophonic Workshop had been founded in 1958, with a brief to produce effects and new music for radio and television using new techniques available in the new electronic age. It was based in the BBC's Maida Vale Studios in Delaware Road, north-west London.

Verity Lambert had by now abandoned her original idea of asking the French group Les Structures Sonores to provide the title music. A meeting with the head of the Workshop, Desmond Briscoe, had persuaded Lambert that what she needed was "something electronic with a strong beat", something "familiar, but different" - something the Radiophonic Workshop could provide. Lambert was keen to obtain the services of Ron Grainer to write the music.

Grainer was an Australian composer who had been living in London for the past ten years. After working as a pianist in a nightclub, he had achieved some success as a composer, creating the scores for a number of TV series and a couple of features films. In 1961 he had won an Ivor Novello Award for the theme to Maigret, the series based on the books by Georges Simenon. Grainer had already worked with the Radiophone Workshop when creating his score for Giants of Steam, a documentary about railways.

Assigned to create the music would be one of the Radiophonic Workshop's staff, Delia Derbyshire. She had joined the BBC in 1960 working as a radio studio manager before joining the Workshop in 1962. The music she provided to herald the start of each episode of Doctor Who is now regarded as one of the most significant and innovative piece of electronic music ever produced. That it was created in the early Sixties, in the days before multi-track recorders and commercial synthesizers, is truly amazing. Aided by assistant Dick Mills, Derbyshire created each note separately by cutting, splicing, speeding up, and slowing down recordings of a single plucked string, white noise, and the output of test-tone oscillators. The notes were then edited together on quarter-inch tape. Mixing was done by starting several tape machines simultaneously and mixing the outputs together.

Grainer was highly impressed with the final result, famously asking Derbyshire, "Did I write that?" Her reply became equally famous: "Most of it."

Another important element of the show would be the special sounds. In charge for the first episode would be Brian Hodgson, who had joined the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1962. One of the most important effects that would be needed for the new series would be that of the Doctor's time-and-spaceship dematerialising. The ship had by now been named the TARDIS. Hodgson produced the effect by dragging the key to his mother's back door along the strings of an old, gutted piano. The resulting sound was recorded and electronically processed with echo and reverb. Hodgson would provide most of the special sounds for the series until 1972, creating much of the soundscape of Doctor Who.

While the music was being put together, events around the series were moving on. William Hartnell had attended Television Centre in west London for make-up and costume tests in the first week of August, and Carole Ann Ford would attend the following week. Terry Nation had submitted his scripts for the fourth story of the season and the production team had decided to up the episode count to seven to better serve the story. The story was, however, likely to be moved back to fifth in the season as script editor David Whitaker was keen to include a story where the TARDIS crew get reduced in size. This, however, was dependent on getting a better studio allocation with more up-to-date equipment to help achieve the effects needed for such a story.

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

Production is now well underway on the new science-fiction series, and with the first filming just a couple of months away it was time to announce the cast.

It was on Wednesday 31st July 1963, exactly fifty years ago today, that the four main cast members were issued with their contracts.

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

With the production team now working hard on the new science-fiction series, thoughts in the BBC turned to how the series would be promoted.

It was on Tuesday 23rd July 1963 - exactly 50 years ago today - that Richard Bright, the Television Publicity Organiser, circulated a memo to members of his department. He attached the format document for Doctor Who that gave a brief rundown of how the series would be broadcast, referencing The World of Tim Frazer, a Francis Durbridge crime series that had aired in 1960. The format document gave the planned recording times and indicated the series would start mid-November. The date of the first episode was now planned to be broadcast on Saturday 16th November, having recently been pushed back a week thanks to unplanned coverage of athletics from Moscow earlier in July, which had knocked the schedule back a week..

• Story 1: Written by Anthony Coburn. Directed by Waris Hussein
Four Episodes. The story begins the journey and takes the travellers back to 100,000BC and Palaeolithic man. In this story the 'ship' is slightly damaged and forever afterward is erratic in certain sections of its controls.
• Story 2: Written by Anthony Coburn. Directed by Rex Tucker
Six Episodes. This story takes the travellers to somewhere in the 30th Century, forward to the world when it is inhabited only by robots.
• Story 3: Written by John Lucarotti. Directed by Waris Hussein
Seven Episodes. The travellers join the explorer Marco Polo on his Journey to Cathay.

Bright gave his team some details of the people behind the new series. While the press department was being briefed on the new serial, a new dispute was being settled by Ronald Waldman, the General Manager of Television Enterprises, and R G Walford, the Head of Copyright. It involved a company called Zenith Film Productions Ltd which had contacted the BBC, claiming the idea for Doctor Who had originally come from them. Their claim related to a puppet series they had proposed to the Corporation called The Time Travellers, which the BBC had turned down because of its similarity to Doctor Who. Zenith now claimed that the BBC had stolen the idea and used it to create their own series. On Thursday 25th July, Walford wrote to the company to refute the allegations. The BBC did offer Zenith a special ex-gratia payment of 100 guineas as an offer of goodwill, on the understanding that it was without prejudice and that the offer made no admittance of legal liability.

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

Production is progressing on the new series due for transmission on BBC Television in the Autumn. With key production personnel in place, attention has moved on to casting the main characters in the show.

July 1963 was mostly cool and changeable as production at Television Centre in west London continued on the new television drama, which by now had a name, Doctor Who. Producing a television drama is a complicated thing, with so many departments needing to work together and so many people all needing to make sure their part of the puzzle would fit into the whole picture. One of the most important parts of the whole is design. Design in Television is vital, especially in science fiction drama where new worlds and future landscapes need to be created. The requirements for the new programme were enormous and producer Verity Lambert thought she was not getting the best out of the BBC design department.

Lambert had been pressing the Design Manager James Bould and Head of Design Richard Levin to allocate a designer to the new series since the end of June, but it was not until Wednesday 10th July that Lambert was finally given a name. The first four episodes would be designed by Peter Brachacki. That day, Lambert and Associate Producer Mervyn Pinfield had a meeting with Brachacki. It was not a total meeting of minds as it was obvious Brachacki was not keen on working on the series. He could spare them half an hour and announced he would be unavailable for the next two weeks.

This was something that worried Lambert, and after reflecting on the situation, on Wednesday 17th July, exactly 50 years ago today, she sent her boss, Donald Wilson, a memo outlining her concerns and expressing a wish that the production should not suffer 'because of a lack of effort from the Design department'. Wilson took up the matter and wrote to the Head of the Design department. Music is another vital element in a television drama and Lambert was determined to try something different on this series. On Friday 12th July she made enquiries about commissioning the French electronic music composers Jacques Lasry and Francois Bascher to provide the title music for the series. Their group, Les Structures, were known for creating music using such techniques as glass rods mounted in steel.

By the middle of July, Script Editor David Whitaker had refined the original concept document, making significant changes to the character structure. Whitaker made clear in his changes that the main cast would be forbidden from interfering with history. The character of the Doctor was now described as 'over sixty' rather than 'about 650' and his granddaughter, Susan, was to be a 'sharp intelligent girl who sometimes makes mistakes because of inexperience'. He made notes on the spaceship that would feature in the programme. The actual scripts for the first 10 episodes, now confirmed at a duration of 25 minutes, were still being worked on by Anthony Coburn. He signed the formal contract on 8th July and would be paid £225 for each episode. The contract made it clear that the concept of Doctor Who and its four main characters would remain the copyright of the BBC and not belong to Coburn. Coburn's fee would be paid in 12 instalments.

The story structure for those first ten episodes was also outlined by Whitaker.

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

The story so far: Pre-production is now under way on the new Saturday evening science fiction series Doctor Who. Conceived by Sydney Newman, the series was expected to air on BBC Television in the late summer. A producer had been appointed, Verity Lambert, but the show was far from being ready. With no completed scripts and no actors yet cast, the new producer was in for a rocky ride.

At the end of June Sydney Newman returned from holiday to discover all was not well with his new show. Like any big organisation the BBC throughout its history has often suffered from an overblown bureaucracy and middle managers determined to protect process over progress, Doctor Who was not immune from such obstacles and on the 27th June 1963, exactly fifty years ago today, Newman was determined to tackle the problem.

In a heated phone call with Joanna Spicer, the Assistant Controller (Planning) Television, Newman listened to some of the complaints. The new series had bypassed the proper BBC procedures and the production had been carrying out auditions without authorisation he heard. Indeed just two days before director Rex Tucker had been interviewing actresses for the role of Susan Foreman. Furthermore, he was told the series would place unacceptable demands on the servicing departments due to its ambitious nature. Scripts weren’t ready and production was way behind schedule.

Newman leapt to the defence of his team. He dictated a memo to Spicer which pulled no punches. It was entitled Doctor Who Hassle.
Newman's memo caused much discussion in the upper echelons of BBC Television. At a meeting with Donald Baverstock, Spicer and her Head of Department decided to rethink the early evening Saturday slot. The original plan was to fill 50 minutes with programming aimed at children. They now reduced this to 30 minutes between 5.20pm and 5.50pm each Saturday. The slot would be initially filled with the cartoon series Deputy Dawg and then Doctor Who. The new series would now need to be made in 30-minute episodes, so to give the production team more time it was decided Doctor Who would now be delayed by eight weeks. The pilot episode would be recorded on Friday 27th September and the series would debut on Saturday 9th November.

The budget for the series was now set at £2,300 per episode. Newman was asked to confirm that the costs of the 'time/space' machine would be met from an additional budget. The team were allocated Lime Grove Studio D. Newman accepted most of these changes but was unhappy about the proposal to increase the running time to 30 minutes. In this he was supported by Ronald Waldman, the General Manager of Television Enterprises, who favoured 25-minute episodes for overseas sales.

One major problem caused by the delay was the fact that Rex Tucker, the assigned director of the first story, would not be available to direct the story as he would be on holiday in Majorca at the time the episodes were in production. It was therefore decided to swap the first two directors around. The first story would now be directed by newcomer Waris Hussein, with Tucker taking on the second. With script editor David Whitaker now on board too, the production was now complete. But they still needed four character actors to play the main roles. Disliking Tucker's suggestions for the roles, Hussein and Lambert began the search in earnest.

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

The story so far: With Doctor Who having been initially conceived and formatted by Sydney Newman, Donald Wilson and CE Webber, along with other staff and writers in the BBC's script department, work on actually getting the series made is now under way. Although some scripts are in development, none of the main characters has yet been cast, and by June 1963 the programme does not even have a producer in place . . .

In the early summer of 1963, the day-to-day management of Doctor Who was in the hands of producer-director Rex Tucker. It was never envisaged that Tucker would be the producer of the series in the long term, but it was at the time planned that he would be the chief director on the programme, to helm the first serial and then several others across the proposed 52-week run.

Tucker's temporary position as producer of Doctor Who, in addition to his directorial duties, reflected something of a state of change in the way BBC dramas were being produced at the time. In the 1950s, it was common for a single producer-director to have overall practical and artistic control over a production, and Tucker himself had a great deal of experience in this producer-director role on a number of children's serials and adaptations of classic literature.

By the early 1960s, and in tandem with Newman's arrival as Head of Drama Group at the BBC, the system was changing for drama series and serials. The main regular members of a production team would be the producer and story editor, with directors being appointed on an ad hoc, serial-by-serial or episode-by-episode basis, much like the writers. But despite the knowledge that he would not be the full-time producer of the series, Tucker took full charge of all areas of production for the fledgling Doctor Who in May and early June 1963 – including ideas of casting.

Tucker was friends with an actor called Hugh David, a 37-year-old Welshman who had recently come to public attention as one of the stars of a Granada Television crime-drama series called Knight Errant Limited. Although David was younger than the "frail old man" envisaged by Newman, Wilson and Webber, at some point by early June 1963 Tucker had offered him the role of the Doctor – quite possibly the first actor ever to be asked to play the part.

David, however, had been uncomfortable with the public recognition that starring as Stephen Drummond in Knight Errant Limited had brought him, and he was reluctant to now become the star of another programme, so turned down Tucker's offer. He eventually decided to wind down his acting career not long after this, and made a move behind the cameras, working as a director. In this capacity, he would go on to direct two Doctor Who stories later in the 1960s, during the Patrick Troughton era – The Highlanders and Fury From the Deep. In later years, David would go on to make the claim that it had been Tucker who came up with the title Doctor Who, although there is no documentary evidence for this, and it is not a claim that Tucker ever made himself.

Despite Tucker's offer to his friend, it is doubtful that David would have ended up playing the Doctor even if he had been keen on the role. Not long after the offer had been made, Doctor Who finally had a full-time producer assigned to take charge of the series, someone who would later state that David would have been too young for the part.

But this producer had not been the first choice for the job.

When Newman was attempting to find a producer for Doctor Who, his first port of call was 26-year-old director Don Taylor, to whom he offered the job at an unknown point, probably in May or June 1963. This offer was something of an olive branch from Newman, as Taylor was a somewhat higher-brow and more classically-cultured figure than the Canadian, and he was horrified by the idea of such an unashamed populist being in charge of the BBC's drama output. In his memoir Days of Vision, published in 1990, Taylor wrote scathingly of Newman, saying that:


Taylor was best-known for working on sophisticated single plays for adult viewers, particularly for his work directing the plays of David Mercer. Newman's Doctor Who offer held no interest for him, and he turned the producer's job down flat. Later in 1963 he resigned from the staff of the BBC in despair at the changes being wrought under Newman, particularly the abolition of the old producer-director system, and he would later claim to have been blacklisted from working for the drama department as a freelance director. Speaking to Doctor Who Magazine in 1993, however, Taylor had a more conciliatory attitude towards Newman and his offer:


Newman next turned to someone who would perhaps have been rather a better fit for Doctor Who – 43-year-old producer-director Shaun Sutton. Sutton had formed a particular reputation for his work on children's serials in the 1950s, and unlike Taylor he had great respect and admiration for Newman. However, like Taylor, he also turned down Newman's offer to become Doctor Who's first producer. This was because he was keen to move on from children's drama and was interested in tackling more adult fare – he had already worked as a director on episodes of the police drama Z-Cars since that series had begun in 1962.

Sutton did, however, later go on to become involved in the production of Doctor Who. In 1966 he became the Head of Serials in the drama department, in which role he was effectively the show's executive producer. He gave approval for William Hartnell to be replaced, and was involved in the decision to cast Troughton as the Second Doctor. He later succeeded Newman as overall Head of Drama at the BBC, a role he went on to occupy until 1981 – longer than anyone else either before or since.

With both Taylor and Sutton having rejected the chance to take charge of the series, and a full-time producer badly needing to be appointed, Newman's thoughts turned back to his time in commercial television, at ABC. While working at the ITV contractor, he had been impressed by the verve and the vigour of a young production assistant in the drama department named Verity Lambert. With nobody else seeming to want to produce Doctor Who, Newman decided to take a chance and offer her the opportunity to follow him to the BBC and become the producer of the new series.

Born in London in November 1935, Lambert had been educated at Roedean School, near Brighton, and at the Sorbonne in Paris. She entered the television industry in 1956, working as a secretary at Granada Television, before moving to ABC Television a few months later. She was initially the secretary for the company's Head of Drama prior to Newman, Dennis Vance, before moving on to become a production secretary and then a production assistant. It was in this latter capacity that she had worked with Newman on dramas such as Armchair Theatre, and she had displayed the capable, positive attitude that had so impressed him. As he later told Doctor Who Magazine:


In 1961, Lambert had taken a break from ABC to work for a year as the personal assistant to noted American television producer David Susskind in New York. She returned to the UK in 1962, determined to become either a producer or a director, but no opportunities for promotion were forthcoming, and she remained as a production assistant at ABC.

Frustrated at this lack of opportunity, she had considered giving up television as a career entirely, until the offer from Newman to come to the BBC and finally earn the promotion she wanted. While she freely admitted to Newman that she knew nothing about children, he remained convinced that she was the right person for the job. If there were misgivings among any of Newman's fellow executives at the Corporation, these were perhaps allayed at least a little by the fact that the previous month the highly-experienced Mervyn Pinfield had been appointed as associate producer of Doctor Who, to advise particularly on technical matters (see previous episode). Tucker would also still be around as the principal director for the series – although this state of affairs would not last for very long after Lambert's appointment, as the pair of them disagreed over many aspects of the programme.

But that was all to come. By Friday 14th June 1963 - exactly 50 years ago today - the 27-year-old Lambert had arrived at her new office in Room 5014 at BBC Television Centre as the Corporation's youngest – and only female – drama producer. One of the first people sent to see her was a young Indian director called Waris Hussein, who around this time had been assigned to direct episodes of Doctor Who. Lambert and Hussein got on well at once, with the pair happy to admit to each other that neither of them knew quite what they had let themselves in for.