Ten Acre Pull To Open 1962-1963: The Inside Story of How the BBC Brought Back Doctor Who

Author	Paul Hayes
ISBN	1 908 63084 1
Publisher	Ten Acre
Published	2023

Summary: Pull to Open explores the behind-the-scenes saga of Doctor Who in 1963, when a chain of events at the BBC brought together a disparate group to launch what would become one of British TV's best-loved and most successful programmes. It's the story of why these events happened; the BBC creative culture into which Doctor Who was born; how television drama was made in the early 1960s; and an insight into the people who started this epic journey

• Further Than We've Ever Gone Before by Niall Jones

Further Than We've Ever Gone Before by Niall Jones 2/12/24

Very few people remember Emerald Soup. As Paul Hayes puts it in Pull to Open, this children's sci-fi series 'came and went without ever leaving much of a mark on British television history'. A story about scientists creating a secret formula in a remote coastal location, while criminals try to steal it, it ran for seven weeks and then disappeared. Despite this, the series has not been completely forgotten, as it has an obscure link to another, much more popular and enduring sci-fi series from the time. The fact that episode three of Emerald Soup was broadcast on ITV at 17:15 on 23 November 1963 has given it the smallest of legacies.

As Hayes notes:

There was no sequel, there were to be no repeats, and there are no episodes of the programme known to exist today. Judging by contemporary newspaper coverage, it attracted few preview features and little in the way of reviews. Yet, like so many other footnotes of television history connected with Doctor Who, the name of Emerald Soup lives on - simply because of its association with that Saturday night in November 1963. The knowledge that it was what was, mostly, 'on the other side' that evening is enough to give it its tiny place in cultural lore.

As Hayes admits, the story of Doctor Who's early days is one that has been told multiple times, perhaps most famously in Mark Gatiss's 2013 TV film An Adventure in Space and Time, but his re-telling nevertheless digs new ground, not just by uncovering new information, but also by telling the story of Doctor Who as part of the history of British television. While 23 November has long been the day most associated with Doctor Who, the centrality of this date in 1963 disguises the fact that, as well as being the start of something, it was also the end of something. Doctor Who may have been born on that day, with the broadcast of An Unearthly Child, but its conception lies further back in time.

Exactly how much further back is a question that Hayes attempts to answer. He begins his story on 25 April 1962, with a short note typed by Alice Frick, a member of the BBC Script Department. Co-written by colleague Donald Bull, the memo 'concerned literary science-fiction and its relevance to BBC television drama'. While this may seem like a very broad theme - and the BBC had in fact already produced a number of sci-fi series, both for radio and TV - it is the first link in a chain that would eventually lead to the creation of Doctor Who.

Like another, better-known character involved in the launch of Doctor Who, producer Sydney Newman, Frick was born in Canada, hailing from the tiny prairie town of Coronation, Alberta. She had a successful career at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where she worked as a script editor on radio plays, overseeing a 'golden age for radio drama in Canada', and campaigned for women's rights at the company, before moving permanently to England in 1961 to work for the BBC.

Alice Frick is a name that even the most die-hard fans may never have come across, as she never actually worked on the series itself. The last reference to her in the BBC's Doctor Who archives comes on 23 May 1963, when she sent Head of Serials Donald Wilson a list of authors who 'might be useful in supplying storylines' for the new sci-fi series. Hayes includes biographies of almost everyone who contributed to the creation of Doctor Who, no matter how small their role may seem. By including them, Hayes takes people who may previously have been nothing more than a name on a page and brings to life the details of their lives and careers.

In fact, Pull to Open is full of fascinating details about these people. For example, that Verity Lambert once produced a live TV play during which a member of the cast died partway through; that writer C.E. Webber suggested casting pop star Cliff Richard as a companion; that William Hartnell was so successful in lying about his early life that the truth about his difficult upbringing didn't emerge until the publication of the biography Who's There? by his granddaughter Jessica Carney in 1996.

While Pull to Open is hugely detailed, creating a thorough portrait of what the BBC was like in the early 1960s, Hayes admits that certain questions about the origins of Doctor Who may never be fully answered. At one point, he acknowledges that 'at some point between March 29 and May 15 1963, Doctor Who was created', confessing that there's not enough surviving documentation to be more precise. Other questions, such as who invented the word 'TARDIS' have conflicting answers. Perhaps, like the series itself, with its missing episodes, the story of Doctor Who is one that we will never fully know.

Despite this, the book's comprehensiveness cannot be understated. Crucially, it doesn't tell the story of Doctor Who in isolation, but places it into the political, cultural and technological context of the time. Throughout the book, Hayes refers to events such as the 1962 FIFA World Cup (the last not to be fully broadcast live in the UK), the rise of the Beatles and the Profumo Scandal. He devotes a whole chapter to the assassination of John F Kennedy, considering not only the impact it had on the cast of Doctor Who - who were recording The Survivors when news of the murder broke - but also the way in which the BBC and ITV presented the news and the challenge of re-arranging their TV schedules in response.

At the same time, he explores the televisual landscape into which Doctor Who was emerging, highlighting the ways in which TV drama was beginning to transition away from its origins as, effectively, recorded theatre and towards a more film-like structure, combining studio work with location filming. Despite the necessary focus on the BBC, he also discusses the role of its commercial rival, ITV, which, at the time, was made up of numerous regional franchises. Despite the BBC's strong association with British television as a whole, ITV was by far the more successful broadcaster in the early 1960s, taking 69% of the audience share in the first quarter of 1961. This fact highlights the BBC's need to innovate at the time and shows that the creation of Doctor Who came at a point when the corporation was emerging from a position of weakness, regaining audiences only through the launch of a number of seminal TV series, including the political satire That Was The Week That Was, the police drama Z-Cars and the sitcom Steptoe and Son.

The story of Doctor Who's creation has long fascinated fans, and Pull to Open provides plenty of fascinating details about alternative directions that the show could have taken. Some of these are obvious, such as the other actors who might have played the Doctor, but others are rather more surprising. Perhaps the most bizarre is the idea, featured in C.E. Webber's proposed script The Giants, that the Doctor wouldn't have initially been able to speak English, but would have been quickly taught the language by his companion, a teacher then referred to as Lola. While some of the ideas in Webber's script were later reused in Planet of Giants, this one was nixed for good.

While the appeal of Pull to Open to fans is obvious, it shouldn't end there. Like Russell T Davies' The Writer's Tale, its exploration of the TV industry is so thorough that it should be required reading for anyone with an interest in the story of television. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that the story of Doctor Who is the story of British TV, Pull to Open shows that the history of Doctor Who is a useful lens through which to consider the development of British TV drama. After all, as the example of Emerald Soup illustrates, things get remembered better if they have a link to Doctor Who.