Doctor Who is the most versatile and imaginative of television—or, perhaps, storytelling—formats ever devised.
“It all started out as a mild curiosity in a junkyard, and now it’s turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure, don’t you think?”
Though Sydney Newman oversaw the conception and C.E. Webber wrote the initial format, it was Anthony Coburn who wrote the first produced script:
In the street we hear two things. We hear the striking of three o’clock from a nearby clocktower and following teat we hear the approaching crunch of a pol iceman on his beat.
We see the policeman only as a vague, slowly-moving figure, coming towards us in the fog.
We pull back to see the policeman against these Gates.
In one of the gates is a smaller entry gate. This is closed.
The policeman flashes his torch on the gates.
We read the faded writing on the gates. I. M. FOREMAN, SCRAP MERCHANT, and a smaller, newer sign: “PRIVATE — KEEP OUT”
The policeman pushes the smaller gate, which opens. He looks through it into the yard. Then he closes it and moves on.
We stay on the gate. We see swirling of fog in front of the small gate and slowly it opens, creaking a bit as it does.
There is all manner of junk lying about the yard.
We see a police box.
Anthony Coburn (1917–77)
Wilson, noting the following requirements for “the Saturday serial,” tentatively called The Troubleshooters:
and outlining its principal cast:
The handsome young man hero
The handsome well-dressed heroine aged about 30
The maturer man, 35 – 40, with some “character” twist
[Sydney Newman would add “a kid to get into trouble”]
The “maturer man” would subsequently age several hundred years and one could argue his “`character’ twist” might be that he was neither a man, in the broader sense of a human native to Earth or—per Newman’s hypothetical suggestion in 1986 or the fact of 2018—in the sense of gender. Nevertheless, C.E. Webber (1909–69) was among the earliest key contributors to a legend.
Sydney Newman was offered a job by Walt Disney in 1938, but couldn’t accept due to an inability to secure a work visa. He returned to his native Canada and found work as a film editor. By 1954, he’d become CBC’s Supervisor of Drama Productions, and exports of his television work secured an invitation to the UK, becoming Head of Drama at ABC before being lured to the BBC where he assembled the team required to create “the Saturday serial.”
“We required a new programme that would bridge the state of mind of sports fans, and the teenage pop music audience, while attracting and holding the children’s audience accustomed to their Saturday afternoon serial. It had to be a children’s programme and still attract both teenagers and adults. Also, as a children’s programme, I was intent upon it containing basic factual information that could be described as educational, or, at least, mind opening for them. So my first thought was of a time-space machine with contemporary characters who would be able to travel forward and backward in time, and inward and outward in space. All the stories were to be based on scientific or historical facts as we knew them at the time.”
Sydney Newman (1917–97)
“The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly.
“In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero. These days there aren’t so many of them around…”
Terrance Dicks (1935–2019)
“You need to have discipline in order to be truly creative.”
Delia Derbyshire (1937–2001)
“There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, the sea’s asleep and the rivers dream. People made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there is danger and somewhere there’s injustice and somewhere else the tea is getting cold…
“Come on Ace, we’ve got work to do.”
My friend Andrew Cartmel wrote those words twenty-six years ago, and they closed out what was—for fifteen years—the final season of Doctor Who on 6 December 1989.
Do you ever look at something and think, “Has no one else noticed this?” That’s exactly what I did when I sat down to watch The Prisoner in a marathon session earlier this week. Think about it. You have an isolated location honeycombed with strange bunkers where bizarre experiments are being carried out on unsuspecting subjects and no one’s quite sure who are the prisoners and who are the wardens. There’s an unconventional sentry in the form of Rover. Even those who seem to have power might be pawns in a larger, unseen game. Does this sound increasingly familiar? It probably does if you watch Lost.
These are broad points of comparison, but one could get even more specific—the raft Number Six builds in “Many Happy Returns” is reminiscent of Michael’s similar endeavor while the crew of the boat that picks up the Prisoner in “Checkmate” has much in common with the motives of the Other called Tom in “Exodus Part 2.” The Prisoner’s excursions outside the Village in “Many Happy Returns” and “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling” serve the same purpose of exposing his backstory that the character-oriented flashbacks do in a given episode of Lost. The overriding notion that the government has the right to keep a former employee with specialized knowledge under lock and key in the Village seems to be the same attitude underlying the DHARMA Initiative Island, simply substituting the corporate power of the Hanso Foundation for the British (or enemy) government behind the Village. Both shows, at their ethical roots, are about the individual enslaved at the convenience of an all-powerful organization with no recourse to appeal.
I could go on and on, detailing correlations perceived in reviewing Patrick McGoohan’s televisual masterpiece, but all these cosmetic and philosophical similarities seem to point to one key notion imbedded in the creation of both shows. In each case, the series seem to serve as a weekly Rorschach test for the audience. You come to the episode with all your personal baggage and you perceive the hour’s presentation through the lens of your own experience and opinions. Take, for example, my first experience with The Prisoner. I was around 13 years old and had been a fan of Doctor Who for at least a couple years. I had seen a mail order catalog of sf merchandise and noted The Prisoner’s proximity to Doctor Who in the British ghetto at the back of the publication. When I noted a listing for the first episode on my local PBS station, I stayed up to midnight to watch it—there weren’t many opportunities to catch obscure UK shows in those pre-DVD days. I can honestly say that I didn’t get it, but that didn’t stop me from trying to grasp what it was doing.
I watched the first 16 installments religiously and suffered something of a crisis when a power outage caused me to miss the 17th and final outing. Luckily, the advent of Suncoast Video in my local shopping mall solved the problem for the hefty fee of $29.95 (six weeks’ allowance, plus sales tax), and “Fall Out” rolled over me like an 18-wheeler with a radar dish on top. I still didn’t get it, but I was certain it must be brilliant. It did, however, give me what I needed—a nice dose of something foreign and thoughtful. A few years later, I saw the series again and my teenaged mind locked onto the notion of rebellion and the need to challenge the status quo. Of course, I wasn’t sure why I needed to rebel or how to go about it; looking back, I see shades of the finale’s Brando-esque Number 48 in my thinking. “Whadda you got?”
Later viewings found me refining my appreciation of the ambiguities proffered by The Prisoner, although my estimation of the four episodes filmed during the second production block (“Do Not Forsake Me…,” “Living in Harmony,” “The Girl Who Was Death,” and “Fall Out”) has not fared as well as my sentiments toward the whole, but that’s a talk for a different time.
I hope, in future viewings, that my feelings toward Lost will continue to evolve and change, depending on my situation in life. The series has captured the public imagination and is committed to asking more questions than it answers in true Prisoner-style. The larger cast offers a broader array of perspectives from which to perceive the action of the story and, like the surreal campus of the Village, the island is an iconic setting for the philosophical struggles at hand. For the moment, I find my allegiances rest most often with John Locke, Eko, and sometimes Sawyer. I suspect that as I grow older, I may find other characters closer to my sympathies. Regular readers of my opinions here on Cinescape know that I can’t abide Charlie or Michael and there’s probably a marvelously Freudian reason that I’ve yet to ascertain. I find Kate an enigma at best and a two-dimensional cutout at worst. Maybe I lack something in my own make-up that prevents me from relating to her.
In developing the cast, the creators of Lost have represented every man rather than The Prisoner’s Everyman—a statement on the divergence of our society or an embracing of diversity in our cultures…I’m not sure. Whatever the case, I’m held captive by both shows and escape seems unlikely.
This essay originally appeared as the 31 July 2006 installment of my TV Wasteland column at Cinescape.
©2006 by Jason Davis. All rights reserved.