As I totter, gin-soaked and bloated, towards my impending 44th birthday, I ponder the damnable vicissitudes of memory. And more specifically, why one can seem to recall some things with outstanding clarity, while some are doomed to forever languish beneath the mental murk, seemingly never to be dragged back into the light of day.
Trees, for example, bother me greatly.
I adore trees, but for the life of me, my ability to identify the many and varied arboreal species that bless our green and pleasant land is shamefully lacking.
When I was but a young slip of a Monoid, I had a poster on the back of my bedroom door that had illustrations of all the major trees indigenous to the United Kingdom. While I can remember the name of the magazine that produced this handy reference material ("The Living Countryside", one of those periodicals that builds week-by-week until you're heartily sick of it and realise that you'd have been financially better-off buying a book on the subject), I still can't immediately differentiate between an elm and a sycamore.
And yet other things seem to burn themselves so deeply into your psyche that your synaesthetic recall is almost bordering on the autistic (or whatever the latest hateful term is for branding someone abnormal who is quite happy thank you just doing their own thing, and not giving much of a fuck about you, no siree).
Older readers night wish to turn their attentions to November and December 1963, but I'm quite happy just to focus on November 1981, when John Nathan-Turner helped set me on the path I still tread to this day; being spellbound by 1960s monochrome television series in general and Doctor Who in particular.
Yes, back to the very beginning. And what an introduction it was. (And for the first episode at least, lodged so indelibly in the memory, where it will probably remain with me when in a possible future I can no longer recognise friends and family).
It's still hard to convey the enormity of "The Five Faces of Doctor Who" repeat season, even though I've had a few goes at it already. Being able to see proper black and white television from that magical unattainable era that brought us Z Cars, Quatermass and The Forsyte Saga was just excitement on a stick.
With Doctor Who Monthly routinely referring to everything black and white (with the exception of "The Gunfighters") as "classic", it would have taken nothing short of brain-death to stop an eager nine year old such as myself from getting rather excited about the prospect of being able to see the first Doctor Who story ever.
Yes, ever.
And to a nine year old, anything from eighteen years in the past seemed from a time so distant and unimaginable as to make anything from that period akin to a holy relic. Which "An Unearthly Child" (aka "100,00 BC", aka "The Tribe of Gum", aka "The Stone Age", aka "Doctor Who and the Cave Men") unarguably is.
Nice moody one of William Russell, there. It's such a lovely touch that in those Reithian early days the two teachers dragged unwittingly into Time and Space cover the Science and History subjects. Nowadays, Ian and Barbara would probably be Susan's R.E. and Drama tutors...
I still find it somewhat difficult to view Serial A in some sort of adult perspective, as the childhood awe and wonder are still deeply resonating thirty five years down the line. And as alluded to at the start, the first episode is so mentally embedded that I just can't imagine my life without it.
Carole Ann Ford's expression is a bit odd there. She looks like she's having a really filthy thought about something. Anal sex, I'm betting.
Idiots often assert that Serial A essentially consists of a one episode introduction, and three episodes of dull faffing about with cavemen. This is a woeful misreading of the situation, as travelling back to the (cough) Dawn of Time is a handy dramatic contrast on so many levels. Even the above photo foreshadows the Cave of Skulls, if you want get all Sandiferesque about it.
I have no problems with the caveman plot at all, and it's nice to see Derek Newark, Alethea Charlton and Eileen Way all doing their thing so well. It knocks every Hammer prehistoric movie into a cocked hat, to be honest.
And also, the first serial could well have been "The Miniscules". Talk about an underwhelming prospect...
Thinking of that excellent first WTF cliffhanger where a police box again appears in a place where it has no reason to belong, I am somehow reminded that in the past I used to knock "The Aztecs" for being essentially four episodes spent getting to the other side of a wall. "An Unearthly Child" is cut from similar cloth, in that three episodes are spent simply trying to get away from dirty cavemen and back to the TARDIS.
But it's a Season One thing, and none the worse for that. While Tom Baker would have kicked their ass in ten minutes flat, Serial A takes a much more "realistic" view of suddenly finding yourself wrenched from the comforts of the twentieth century and deposited in the midst of a prehistoric tribe of fire worshippers.
But what of Doctor Who himself? William Hartnell's performance is still in its early days, which is perfectly understandable. Veering from standoffish to menacing to apologetic is fairly common over the first four serials, and what we understand today as the character of The First Doctor doesn't really appear until "The Keys of Marinus" and "The Aztecs".
But even (some may say especially) at this early stage, Hartnell turns in such an utterly magnetic and compelling performance that you're left in no doubt that it's his show in more than just the name.
It would be interesting to contemplate what the world today would have made of Doctor Who if it had not been recommissioned beyond its first production block.
But for people like me, it's almost impossible to imagine "An Unearthly Child" as a forgotten footnote in television history, and not the paradigm-shattering moment that it almost certainly was.
Because from the Stone Age on, the rest (as they say) really is history...
