The First Doctor

Wanderer in the Fourth Dimension

(1963–1966)

Basic Data

First story: "An Unearthly Child" (1963)

Final story: "The Tenth Planet" (1966)

Final appearances: "The Three Doctors" (1972, played by William Hartnell) and "The Five Doctors" (1983, played by Richard Hurndall)

The Changing Face of Doctor Who In June 1963, Verity Lambert was hired by Sydney Newman, the head of drama of the British Broadcasting Corporation, to become producer of a new family science-fiction series. Lambert had never produced a television series. She had previously been an assistant to Newman, who had been brought in from Canada by one of the independent networks that was part of the private network ITV.

At ITV, Newman had created a string of hits, including Armchair Theatre and The Avengers, before being poached by the BBC. One of his first problems to solve was the gap between the sports results and the family entertainment programming later in the evening. Newman's solution was Doctor Who, a program that evolved from a tortuous process that began as a committee-led investigation into how the BBC should do science-fiction serials. After much discussion and a few dead ends, Newman shepherded the development — which was mostly conceptualized by writer C.E. Webber — until it took shape as the show Newman envisaged: an older time traveller, a young girl and her two schoolteachers who have adventures in space and time. Newman wanted it to painlessly educate about history and science while avoiding bug-eyed monsters.

Newman felt that Lambert was the person to make this new series happen. She brought the program together, often through sheer force of will, struggling with scripts that weren't quite right, abandoning many of them (the first story originally called for the time travellers to be shrunk to a few inches tall) and casting the main roles. In September 1963, she produced a first episode from a script by Anthony Coburn, which adapted C.E. Webber's ideas ... and had to remake it when Newman objected to, among other things, the harsh characterization of the older time traveller known as the Doctor.

The first episode was remounted with more polished direction, some tweaked dialogue and a softer Doctor. Lambert then had to fight the BBC upper echelons, who perceived the series to be too expensive. She managed to get a second broadcast of the first episode when the debut was overshadowed by the assassination of President Kennedy, which occurred the day before the series' original airing. And somehow, over the objections of her boss, she managed to make the second serial, which featured mutants from a post-atomic world (and definitely not bug-eyed monsters) known as the Daleks.

By January 1964, six weeks after its debut, Doctor Who was more than just a schedule-filler on BBC Television. It was a hit.

Who is William Hartnell? Though he couldn't have known it at the time, 1963 was the best year of William Hartnell's career.

The 55-year-old veteran actor had played his fill of heavies (most notably in 1949's Brighton Rock), police inspectors and army sergeants (most famously in the first Carry On film and the 1957–1961 comedy series The Army Game). But in 1963, everything changed.

January saw the release of This Sporting Life, Lindsay