60th Anniversary Bonuses: Doctor Who and The Daleks—In Colour! & An Adventure in Space and Time

While the first anniversary special proper had to wait for Doctor Who’s proper domain of Saturday night, the actual anniversary day itself—Thursday the 23rd, had a pair of bonus anniversary festivities: a “special edition” of “The Daleks”, and a re-airing of “An Adventure in Space and Time”.

Doctor Who and The Daleks—In Colour!

As part of the 60th anniversary celebrations, the BBC debuted a new version of the shows’s second story from 1963 that introduced the Daleks. Cut down by from nearly three hours to 75 minutes, and colorized, clearly the intent was clearly to made a “more modern”–style version of the story for new viewers to use as a jumping-on point.

The result was not entirely successful, but interesting.

Let’s start with what does work: the color. (Sorry, Colour). It looked much, much better than I was expecting, echoing both the surviving behind-the-scenes photos as well as the Cushing movies. It has a very 60s overly-bold look, with set coloring that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of the original Star Trek (this is a complement).

As for the length? Well…

Let’s talk about the old show’s format for a second. It was a “Series of Serials”; roughly 25 minute weekly episodes that were grouped into multi-episode stories. The show mostly settled on four or six parts as the standard, for various reasons “The Daleks” was seven parts long.

There was the usual grumping about “kids with short attention spans” when it was announced that they were going to do a version with roughly 60% of the content cut out. And look, I’m all for a round of “old men yelling at clouds”, but this isn’t the place. No one, and I mean literally no one, watched the whole thing at once when this was originally made; “The Daleks”wasn’t three hours long, it was two months long, 25 minutes of weirdness smack in the middle of Saturday evenings.

If anything, attention spans have lengthened—Who used to be 25 minutes a week, now it’s 45 or more.

And, watched all in one go, “The Daleks” is interminable. Not only is it designed to be watched one part a week, it’s designed for a world with no recording and no reruns, so something that long had to still make sense if you missed an episode or two. So, that means an awful lot of repetition, covering the same ground every week to keep everyone caught up. It’s a different format than today’s dramas, more like what we would think of as the style of a soap opera instead of a prime-time action-adventure show. And even given that, “The Daleks” specifically has very little happen over that run time.

So on the surface, yeah, you could pretty easily lose two thirds of the content. All the major plot beats are there. But the result is strange, though. It’s cut very tightly with new, very exciting music, over very languid scenes of actors walking and talking very slowly. The result is 75 minutes of a show that frantically presents nothing happening. The whole thing has the quality of a fever dream, not quite real, unfolding with its own strange logic.

It was a worthy experiment, and they made about the best possible attempt. I’m glad they did it, and I hope if they were planning on doing more that they spend that money on something else.

An Adventure in Space and Time

Meanwhile!

One of the highlights of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary ten years ago was Mark Gatiss’ An Adventure in Space and Time, a drama about the creation of Doctor Who, centered around William Hartnell, as played by David Bradley. It’s a great piece of work, nicely covering the start of the show and the challenges faced by original producer Verity Lambert, Hartnell, and the rest. One of the things it does extremely well is explore the fact that Hartnell stayed long past all the other people who started with him, and that he was finally forced to leave due to his ill health.

At the end, there’s a scene where Hartnell is getting ready to film his final scene as The Doctor, and looks up across the Tardis set and sees Matt Smith, the then-current incumbent Doctor, looking back at him. It’s a nice moment, Hartnell having a vision of how long this show of his would carry on.

At the time, Gatiss said they purposely filmed that scene so in the future they could swap in whomever was the incumbent Doctor at the time, strongly implying he was hoping that would become a standard practice for future actors in the role.

Well, they re-aired the movie for the 60th anniversary, and they actually did it, swapping in Ncuti Gatwa.

Delightfully, I think this is his first outing in character? He makes an immediate impression, and I’m even more excited about the future than I already was.