An Unearthly Child opens with a policeman checking the gates to a junkyard, run by I M Foreman, at 76 Totter's Lane. Satisfied they're locked, he moves on. However, as the camera moves in, the gates creak open and we approach a Police Public Call Box which sits incongruously amidst the bric-a-brac. It emits a strange hum...
20 years later, Douglas Camfield would criticise this opening sequence, claiming Waris Hussein was mistaken in doing it this way. He was arguing the logic of the scene. The gates are seen to be locked, so how then could they swing open? Who is opening them?
He was a director who was very much into realism, where every shot had to have a logical, narrative purpose - whereas Hussein was simply being practical as well as allowing for some artistic licence. It didn't matter about the gates being locked, or who might have opened them. He was setting up a mystery which had, at its heart, a Police Box, and this was the way he chose to introduce it.
No one person can claim credit for the TARDIS - either as a concept or for its final physical form. Some people can lay claim to certain aspects of it - such as designer Peter Brachacki, who was responsible for the iconic console room.
The story begins with Eric Maschwitz, head of light entertainment at the BBC. He commissioned a report on the feasibility of using science fiction as a basis for TV drama - a piece undertaken by Alice Frick and Donald Bull. Frick was later asked for a follow-up report, which she undertook with John Braybon. They concluded that two types of story merited further attention - those featuring telepaths, and those involving time travel, of which they favoured the latter as a wider range of writers might be interested.
The recommendations would only be put into practice with the arrival in January 1963 of Sydney Newman, as new Head of Drama. He was a keen follower of science fiction, and for ABC had been responsible for four family adventure serials involving space travel. The first was Target Luna, which was followed by the "Pathfinders" series - Pathfinders in Space, Pathfinders to Mars, and Pathfinders to Venus. All revolved around a family of space adventurers, children of a rocket scientist, who undertook interplanetary travels with adult companions. The final serial had also included a shady older man - Harcourt Brown, played by George Coulouris - who frequently placed the others in jeopardy in order to pursue his own scientific obsessions.
One of the first things he noted was a drop-off in viewers on a Saturday evening following the sports compendium Grandstand, before picking up again an hour later with Juke Box Jury. Various drama serials had been used to fill the slot, but Newman wanted a new family-friendly series, aimed especially at children, which might keep the Grandstand audience.
A meeting was held in March, attended by Newman, Frick and Braybon, along with Donald Wilson (Head of Serials) and staff writer Cecil Edwin Webber, known as "Bunny".
Ideas discussed included stories about telepaths and time travel, as the second report had suggested, but also ones involving flying saucers and computers.
It was the time travel idea which Newman liked the most.
Webber was sent away to develop some character outlines, which included a youngster ("Need a kid to get into trouble") and a pair of young adults who could provide some potential romance, plus an older man with some "character twist". Newman then put together a memo which he passed on to Wilson outlaying the basic premise of the series, with the older man now a mysterious time traveller who was hundreds of years old.
Webber then began work on the opening story, provisionally titled "Nothing At The End Of The Lane", and he suggested that the time machine might be invisible - using electronic inlay techniques to show its entrance - as it was covered in some light resistant material. He also suggested that it disguise itself as an everyday item wherever it went. Another of his ideas was that one of the crew had to remain inside whilst the others went out to explore, in order to anchor it to its location.
Newman dismissed the invisibility notion as he wanted something tangible and visual.
The main character - "Dr Who" - would not be able to steer his ship due to senility, and would be constantly seeking components with which to make repairs.
The time machine itself couldn't be a flying saucer or rocket-like craft as this would be far too big to realise in studio, especially if only going to be seen briefly at the beginning or end of individual storylines. The idea of it disguising itself as an everyday object was agreed upon. It still had to accommodate four people comfortably inside, so the notion of having different dimensions within - bigger on the inside - followed. Objects considered were a Police Box and a workman's hut, and the former was accepted - outlined in May 1963 notes by Webber, before Anthony Coburn came along (who would later lay claim to the idea).
Having the time machine's outward appearance look the same all the time, rather than have it change for every landing site, allowed for a single visual identifier for the programme.
Rex Tucker was brought in to produce the new show, and he brought along former actor and now director Richard Martin to one of the early meetings. Martin came up with the idea that the time machine wasn't a fully physical space, but had some sort of psychological aspect - a mental barrier at its entrance. If you didn't believe in the space within, you simply walked into a normal Police Box. This suggestion wasn't taken up.
Never happy with the assignment, Tucker was allowed to step away from the project and was replaced by Verity Lambert. On her arrival in June she discovered that Webber's draft script - which would have seen the characters reduced to an inch in height and been trapped in a school science lab - had been dropped, and Coburn was now working on an alternative opener - "The Tribe of Gum".
In this, the character Suzanne (who will become Susan) tells her teachers that the time machine was called a Change and Dimensional Selector and Extender.
Despite the story later gaining the title of "100,000 BC", Coburn had it travel back 195,000 years for its encounter with the tribe.
Webber had previously suggested that the time machine and its owner originated in another galaxy in the year 5733, and new Story Editor David Whitaker retained this initially, as there was an idea that it could never travel to any point beyond that year - otherwise the Doctor and Susan would know their own futures.
A draft script from 8th July has the Doctor claim to be 300 years older than Ian, and the time machine responds to verbal commands, spoken by him in an alien language.
It is only in the version dated 12th July that the time machine has been given the name TARDIS - Time And Relative Dimension In Space.
Regarding the exterior, it has been said that an existing Police Box prop was going to be used for the TARDIS, one employed on Dixon of Dock Green, but this proved to be too big to fit into the lifts at Lime Grove Studios - so a smaller one was built specially.
The window surrounds are painted white, and the St John's Ambulance badge can be seen on the right hand door - indicating that the box held First Aid supplies.
On the left hand door is the information panel. Behind this sat the telephone, and the "Pull To Open" instruction refers to this panel, not the whole door.
The info panel and its surround were also white.
In the first version of An Unearthly Child, the Doctor opened the box by shining his pen torch into the lock. This was changed to an ordinary Yale-style key.
Police Public Call Boxes began life as hexagonal cast-iron structures, introduced in Glasgow in 1891. They were red in colour and had a gas lantern on the top. Anyone could use the telephone, which had a direct link to the nearest police control centre.
In 1912, Glasgow began replacing these with rectangular boxes, with an electric light fitting and a telephone which only police officers could now access.
Wooden versions followed in Sunderland in 1923, and in Newcastle in 1925, before spreading to other northern cities including Manchester and Sheffield.
The classic TARDIS version was designed by Gilbert Mackenzie Trench in 1929 and adopted by the Metropolitan Police.
Only one box survives in London, outside Earl's Court tube station, but several can still be seen in Glasgow - though not always painted blue. Some are employed as coffee kiosks.
Generally, only the doors of Metropolitan Police Boxes were wood, the main structure being concrete.
The Glasgow Police Boxes remained red, until a certain TV sci-fi show prompted the police to paint them blue in the 1960's...
As the date for production drew closer - the new series supposed to launch in September - Lambert grew increasingly irritated by the lack of development on the TARDIS interior design. This had been assigned to Brachacki, and in interviews she would claim that he had little interest in the work. It wasn't quite the case, as seen in origins drama An Adventure In Space And Time, that he simply threw it together on a whim from objects on his desk, but a lot of pressure did have to be put on him to come up with the final design. William Hartnell himself was keen to see "his" time machine.
As I've said, the result is iconic, but it isn't exactly as Brachacki had envisioned it, due to budget constraints. £500 had been allocated, and the cost of the TARDIS would actually cause the entire programme to be put at risk...
The first console room set measured 40 feet by 35 feet, taking up the majority of Lime Grove Studio D.
The six-sided central console was built by Shawcraft Models of Uxbridge, and each panel was removable. Brachacki intended for each panel to have handles for this purpose, and he also hoped that microphones could be installed inside these.
The controls themselves were supposed to be specially moulded to fit the Doctor's hands, but instead various standard switches and buttons were used. The central column was 30 inches in diameter, made of perspex and fitted inside with lights supplied by a firm named Clark-Smith). The column rose and fell initially by use of a car foot-pump.
According to the designer, the column was supposed to rise when the TARDIS first took off, and would then rotate. The column would fall again only on landing. It was supposed to be a form of 3-D navigation system, from which the Doctor could see their location. It was never intended to keep going up and down.
The lights on the console were powered via an electrical cable, which can occasionally be glimpsed.
The studio floor was painted blue, and around the base of the console were set hexagonal metal plates.
Another hexagonal shape was suspended above - supposed to represent the power source.
This would quickly be discarded as it was unwieldy and interfered with the positioning of microphone booms.
The scanner was a TV monitor mounted on a frame which could be wheeled around. Brachacki intended that it should lower itself down from the ceiling when needed.
He wanted to use fibreglass for the walls, but this was too costly so they were made of wood, inset with PVC roundels. These were to have been translucent, and pulse with light when the ship was operated.
Two of the walls were photographic blow-ups - one of drilled holes to match the roundels and one of electronic components. The latter would be replaced for the broadcast version of the opening episode.
The designer had intended that the roundels could be removable to allow various camera angles to be achieved, but this was never taken up.
The doors, which caused so much trouble on the pilot episode, were mounted on a metal frame on another wooden wall. They were operated by stagehands and were difficult to balance, resulting in them swinging open or banging when being closed.
It was originally intended that the exterior would not be seen directly through these doors. They would lead to the reverse of the Police Box doors, held closed with a simple latch.
Walls, doors and console were all painted a pale green, which would appear white on screen.
As the series commences, there is nothing yet to say that the TARDIS hasn't come directly to Totter's Lane from the Doctor's homeworld...
In terms of the soundscape, this was entirely the work of Brian Hodgson of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. Famously, his idea for the TARDIS dematerialisation effect was the notion of the "ripping of the fabric of time" - achieved by drawing his house key along the wires of an exposed piano frame, then slowing down and processing the resulting sound. He had used a similar process for the sound of a ship scraping against rocks on a radio production.
In all, Hodgson came up with 8 items for the TARDIS, under the collective title of "Dr Who - Beyond the Sun", which could act as library pieces for the series.
Next time, we'll look at the very first story, and what we learn of the TARDIS in story terms there...
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