Doh!

Doctor Who, even unto its present incarnation, has often got things wrong. We get ropey CGI, plot holes and weird discontinuities in the more recent series, whilst in the Classic phase of the show there were props which didn't work, actors forgetting their lines, and things in shot which shouldn't have been there. There were also many, many things which did not quite make sense. I try to be as positive as I can about all aspects of the programme - we tend to forgive flaws in the things we love - but I thought it might also be fun to highlight some of the times when things did not exactly go to plan. I'm therefore going to embark on a new occasional series looking at each story from the start, looking at what sometimes went wrong. Naturally, this will include some of Bill Hartnell's most infamous fluffs - though he wasn't the only one to trip over their tongue. We'll also have bad special effects, the occasional wobbly set (quite rare actually, despite public perceptions) and those plot holes. In many cases an argument can be found to explain the latter, and I'll try to do this as we go along.
So - not a criticism of the series in any way, more a recognition of the time and financial restraints under which the series used to be made.
Back in the 1960's video tape was so expensive that directors were rationed as to how many edits they could make, as the tape had to be reused (which is one reason why so many old programmes are lost to the archives). If things went wrong, unless it was a complete disaster, the cameras just had to keep rolling - which is why there are so many fluffs in the earliest stories and fewer as time went on. Actors quickly learned that if they wanted a scene to be redone, then they should swear very loudly.
Had it been made just a few years earlier, Doctor Who might have gone out live on a Saturday evening. When an actor dried, the Assistant Floor Manager had a switch on the studio wall which cut the sound, so that the actor could be prompted. On 30th November, 1958, an actor by the name of Gareth Jones was performing in an Armchair Theatre production called Underground. His character suffered a heart attack in the play - and Jones then suffered a real, fatal, one between scenes. His colleagues improvised around this and completed the programme. The show, as they say, must go on.
Live TV in the 1950's also meant that if you wanted to repeat a programme, such as a play, then the cast had to reassemble and perform it all over again. Occasionally, a telecopy might be made - by pointing a camera at a monitor showing the programme. This is why we still have the first two episodes of the original Quatermass Experiment serial from 1953. Unfortunately an insect decided to settle on the monitor, remaining on screen for half of Part Two, so we have a real life giant bug making an uninvited appearance long before the alien creature appears, as anyone who has seen the DVD release will know. The BBC decided not to telecopy the remaining four episodes - so this classic TV series is totally lost to us in its entirety.
In its earliest years, Doctor Who was made "as live" - in that the programme would be recorded entirely in story order in very long takes. The cameras would not necessarily cut at the end of a scene. There might be a scheduled fade to black - inserted so that foreign TV stations could include an advert break - but generally there was a roll-on. If actors had to move to another set, the camera might linger on the face of an actor who wasn't in the next scene, or on some prop or bit of set - all to give cast and cameras time to get ready to continue filming. The cast rehearsed for the week and went into studio on the Friday night - later the Saturday night - for recording of an episode that would be screened about three weeks hence. During Patrick Troughton's time, this was reduced to just one week at times. Once exterior filming came along, these sequences would always be filmed in advance of the studio day so that they could be played in during recording. The actors often had to come out of rehearsals for one story to film the exterior stuff for the forthcoming story - often sacrificing their days off as well to do this.
Music and sound effects would be played in live to the studio, rather than be dubbed on afterwards. Even the opening and closing titles would be played into the studio on cue.
Sometimes the cliffhangers would be telecopied for inclusion at the start of the next week's episode, but a lot of the time they were reenacted by the cast at the start of the following week's recording - which is why they don't always match. Of course, this was long before the days of home video recorders, and viewers weren't expected to recall exactly what the end of the previous week's installment had looked like. At least Doctor Who never went down the path taken by some of those Saturday morning cinema serials such as Flash Gordon, The Undersea Kingdom or King of the Rocketmen, when the filmmakers cheated blatantly. I recall one scene when the characters in one of these serials go over a cliff in a truck - seen clearly in the cab as it falls. Next week, they are seen jumping clear well before the vehicle goes over the edge.

A quick look at the "Pilot" episode of Doctor Who - the first attempt at An Unearthly Child - demonstrates the way the programme was made at the beginning. The episode was recorded in two sections - firstly everything from the opening school corridor scene up to Barbara pushing her way into the Police Box on the junkyard set, then the TARDIS interior scenes were recorded in another single take. To achieve the first section in one go, the camera stays with Susan, making weird Rorschach doodlings when Ian and Barbara leave the classroom - allowing William Russell and Jacqueline Hill to move to the car sitting outside the junkyard gates. Carole Ann Ford then remains in the classroom set to be filmed for the flashback scenes. Ian and Barbara are heard but not seen in these flashbacks, as the actors are sat in that car. This first half of the episode went mostly to plan, although it was Ford who made the programme's first ever dialogue fluff - giving John Smith and the Common Men's chart positions the wrong way round, so that they have gone down the chart rather than up it. The second half of the episode had to be done three times (twice fully and once abandoned part way through), as the TARDIS doors refused to close properly. If you've seen this footage you'll know that the doors continue to open and close behind the actors, banging loudly at times, as the stagehands struggle to control them.
The episode had other problems of a non-technical nature - namely some dialogue which Sydney Newman didn't like, and some of the performances. Susan specifically states that she comes from the 49th Century, and she is seen to be wearing a futuristic silvery tabard. Newman preferred the time-travellers' origins to be more mysterious and less defined, and wanted Susan to wear conventional clothing which teenage viewers could relate to. He also disliked the way that the Doctor and Susan were played - she being a little too alien, and he being too unlikable. Newman also hated the Rorschach bit, which he found incomprehensible.
Producer Verity Lambert and Director Waris Hussein were taken out to lunch by Newman and he set out his objections to the pilot, before ordering them to remount the episode.
Next time, we'll be looking at that remount and the subsequent three episodes which make up the first Doctor Who story, and what still didn't quite go to plan...