People used to ask "where were you when Kennedy was shot?" - but not my contemporaries, who just missed it. I was alive, inside my mother's womb, a bunch of cells busily dividing, growing and organising. I was to be born under the sign of The Sensorites, the day before A Race Against Death, but that was still almost eight months away. Like Doctor Who itself, I was arriving on a cusp between generations. The heyday of Baby Boomer births was past and Generation X - the most aborted generation in history - was still to come. Things looked dodgy for the developing me for a different reason, though: my mother, then 42, had had a series of miscarriages, and my father (born in 1915) was closer in age to William Hartnell than William Russell. They had given up on having children, and the discovery of my presence invoked both hope and fear. They'd been given another chance, but would it work out this time?
I've heard that when Sydney Newman saw the pilot and told them to "do it again," Hartnell was relieved to have another chance. I don't know about Waris Hussein. My guess is that he would have been pleased - how often did a TV director get to use the 20-20 hindsight that comes from completing an episode to improve on that same episode before broadcast? But given the negative initial reaction, he would likely have been nervous as well, though not too severely - after all, BBC TV Controller Donald Baverstock liked the pilot well enough to commit to a minimum run of 13 episodes.
I believe this episode is unique in existing in two, separately-performed versions. Other stories do have multiple versions - consider the Special Editions on The Curse of Fenric and Battlefield DVDs, for example - but they basically come down to editing and post-production changes. Only here do we get to see what is effectively a rough draft of the performances as well.
The pilot episode follows substantially the same plot as the broadcast version, but certainly feels rougher. It's still well-directed, but not outstandingly so, and the camera moves and actors' performances aren't quite as solid. With most things I'm glad they made the changes they did. There's one I'm really sorry to see go, and two I'm less sure of:
The Shot through the TARDIS Doors
This was great! Showing the interior of the TARDIS through the outside doors as Barbara pushes her way in really worked for me. It's probably less than a second long so it doesn't lessen the impact of the change from the mundane to the fantastic, and it really reinforces the illusion that the TARDIS interior is connected to the exterior. I can't imagine why they dropped it.
The Ambiguous Doctor, part 1
The Doctor is even more angry and antagonistic in the pilot. This makes us side with the teachers more forcefully, and it would have been interesting to see his emotional journey from this point, but on balance I think I prefer the more ambivalent version from the episode as broadcast.
Carole Ann Ford and the Decline of Susan, Part 1
Carole Ann Ford was already a mother when she took the job, and at first resisted accepting another child role. To win her over, the part of Susan was sold as unearthly, perhaps telepathic, and with a touch of The Avengers' Cathy Gale; in other words a unique, interesting, independent part. You can see that she took this on board in her performance in the pilot. Susan here is truly weird. I love the bit with the Rorschach blot, which really makes you think "what's up with this girl?" It's notable that in this version she intends to leave with the Doctor if he'll let the teachers go, and it's Earth's history that the Doctor is protecting when he kidnaps them.
The broadcast Susan is more accessible, but is already a long way from the part sold to Ford. As an adult I too would be more interested in the truly "unearthly child" of the pilot, and even if she was humanised and made less capable later, she would have had further to fall. On the other hand, it may have been important to the show's success that there be a child-identification character; and wearing my future knowledge hat, we might also have missed out on the wonderful Vicki.
Incidentally, if anyone wants to find out more about the development of the show prior to broadcast, there's an excellent article in issue 3 of the (free!) Canadian fanzine Whotopia: "An Unearthly Inception", by Laurence Marcus.
Broadcast:
The pilot was eventually broadcast on 26th August 1991, as a "museum piece".
Rating:
8/10. Very good, but it can't equal the real thing.
Next Time:
Really, truly The Cave of Skulls.
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