To celebrate the 55th anniversary of Doctor Who, we asked Teaching & Learning Advisor and self-confessed 'Doctor Who bore' Stephanie Jesper to write something that would highlight the Who-related content within our collections. Here's what she came up with:
Five hours, 16 minutes and 20 seconds (or thereabouts) into the afternoon of Saturday 23rd November 1963, sightings were reported across the country of…
“...an upward shooting probe, similar in a schematic way to conventional representations of space craft taking off. But this upward probe immediately broke up and tilted over to merge with forward rushing ‘clouds’...” (Tulloch & Alvarado, 1983; p.21).
What was this mysterious probe, observed on that November evening 55 years ago? And what, if anything, did it have to do with the disappearance, that same night, of a teenage girl and two teachers from their East London school? Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright's testimony following their sudden London 1965 reappearance (without pupil Susan Foreman) only served to further fuel speculation that the observed probe and the disappearances were the result of an alien abduction. But surely such claims are nonsense?According to Barbara and Ian's testimony, they had been concerned about the welfare of schoolgirl Susan Foreman, and had followed her home only to discover that home was an old police-box in the I.M. Foreman scrapyard at 76 Totter's Lane, Shoreditch. This police-box, they claimed, was actually a spaceship (they called it the TARDIS) capable of travel through time, and both Susan and her grandfather, who they referred to as the Doctor (Doctor who??), were aliens: wanderers in the fourth dimension. Terrified of being discovered, this Doctor character abducted the teachers. But he was unable to steer his spacecraft reliably, and Ian and Barbara were only able to return to London 1965 by stealing another time-ship -- which they then destroyed.
Inevitably, this testimony has met with a good deal of suspicion. But those mysterious sights on that Saturday evening have leant credence to their story, and there is a growing contingent who claim that this was indeed a genuine alien abduction. They point to a number of other cases of suspected alien activity throughout the 1970s or 1980s, most of which they believe to have been fended off by an organisation called UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce). UNIT have been keen to dismiss these alien activity theories, claiming their role is purely humanitarian. In an attempt to assuage further speculation regarding the 1963 incident, they have released the following footage, pieced together from recordings made at the time:
I started with a YorSearch search for this 'Doctor Who' moniker. There are 10 books on the shelves that claim to be about this supposed television programme. Most of them are in the section 'LP' on the second floor of the main Library. Here they are, between Desperate Housewives and EastEnders:
It's the claim of these books and articles that on 23rd November 1963 BBC Television aired the first episode of this 'Doctor Who' thing. But the details they give regarding this broadcast are fanciful to the limits of credibility: the programme was produced by a 28-year-old woman, which would make her the youngest producer at the BBC, and the only female producer, at that time; as this Music thesis in White Rose eTheses Online explains, the haunting theme music was realised by a 26-year-old woman and her pet oscillators: Wobbulator and Jason; its director was both British-Indian and gay... These are levels of representation uncommon now, let alone in the early 1960s! The whole thing seems too fantastical to believe.
If this series was actually broadcast, there must be some record of it in BBC Genome. I looked. There is. There was also stuff turning up in the newspaper archives we have access to. The evidence was mounting. And yet I kept asking around and nobody I talked to had any recollection of ever seeing such a programme. Something didn't seem right. I needed to witness this supposed show with my own eyes. I turned to Box of Broadcasts, and this is what I found: not just one episode of 'Doctor Who', but almost 200!
Working my way through the playlist I'd created, it started to seem like UNIT were right: this was nothing but a television series, albeit an amazing one! Barbara and Ian weren't missing teachers in real life, but well-written characters undergoing genuine development as they traveled to the future, the past, and sideways through time with their irascible alien captor and his granddaughter. Even this Doctor himself changed across the course of the series, on occasion dramatically so. He had been recast multiple times, sometimes replaced with a younger actor, and (I discovered as I skipped to the end of the playlist) now he was even being played by a woman! Yes, this could only be a television programme.
As well as all these episodes on Box of Broadcasts, three series on DVD, and a few clips and episodes on BFI Screen Online, there were scripts at MA 192.9 DAV including one volume which included email and text conversations about the production of the series. With all this evidence mounting up, how could anyone doubt the claim that Doctor Who was a television series that had been going for 55 years (albeit with a big gap between 1989 and 2005 punctured only by a TV movie and a couple of charity comedy skits)?
It wasn't until I was reading Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text that the scales fell from my eyes. Here's the section in question:
“What Elam calls the semiotic ‘thickness’ (multiple codes) of a performed text varies according to the ‘redundancy’ (high predictability) of ‘auxiliary’ performance codes.” (Tulloch & Alvarado, 1983; p.249).
Now some might see this to be a statement about how the codes and conventions of other genres are used in Doctor Who to add new layers of meaning: how the Doctor and his/her companions travel not only to periods in time but to different genres... different television programmes. A historical adventure is an adventure in a costume drama, not merely in the past; the TARDIS travels not from time to time but from channel to channel; it's not an adventure in time and space but an adventure in your television.And yet I recognised this sentence. I recognised it from an episode of the Doctor Who serial "Dragonfire":
“Tell me -- what are your views on the assertion that the semiotic thickness of a performed text varies according to the redundancy of auxiliary performance codes?” (Briggs, I., 1987; p.65).
Yes... This 'series' was even having adventures within its own critical media. It brought to mind the 1968 serial "The Mind Robber", in which the TARDIS crew find themselves in a world of literature devised by the creator of a boys' own adventure character called Captain Jack Harkaway... A name surprisingly close to another Doctor Who character: Captain Jack Harkness. It seemed to me that the boundaries between reality and fiction were melting. I no-longer felt I knew what was real anymore and what was make-believe.As I lay on one of the Fairhurst settees, confused and befuddled, with a freshly made mug of tea by my side, I was approached by a mysterious character with a Scottish accent who addressed herself to me as 'Miss Why' (unquestionably a pseudonym). She offered me the choice of two jelly-babies — one red and one blue — and whispered: "All I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more. You take the blue jelly-baby – the story ends; you wake up in your bed and believe that this 'Doctor Who' thing is just a telly show. You take the red jelly-baby – you come to Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
What I saw beyond that door you would scarcely believe. The room that lay behind it was huuuuge! I had no idea the Fairhurst was so extensive. I couldn't make sense of whereabouts in the building we must've been. But then we weren't in the building. We were in a dimensionally transcendent space-time vehicle!
My jaw dropped with the realisation. At the centre of the room, what looked like a perspex column with a colander inside rose up and down, accompanied by a wheezing groaning sound. We were in flight.
"Where are we going?", I asked.
'Miss Why', clearly another incarnation of the Doctor under a far from opaque pseudonym, explained it all: she was a renegade Time Lord who'd escaped her home planet of Gallifrey (in the constellation of Kasterborous) with a device they called The Matrix: a massive computer system that acts as the repository of the combined knowledge of her people — kind of like White Rose Research Online. But this Matrix was capable of recording all the events taking place within and around any TARDIS ship, which meant that every adventure of every Time Lord (the Doctor included) was retained therein. The DVDs on our shelves in the John Barry Audiovisual collection; the episodes on Box of Broadcasts — these weren't television; these were Matrix recordings which UNIT had somehow managed to get hold of and edit into regular 25 minute episodes as a ridiculously convoluted way of covering up alien activity: alien artifacts actually being used to distract us from the aliens... it was the perfect deception!
"So why has no-one ever heard of this 'Doctor Who' programme?", I asked.
"Because I've altered time, silly!", the strange Scottish woman replied, hooking the bamboo handle of a large umbrella around one of the ship's controls and letting it carry her weight that she might arc, gracefully, towards me.
I gulped. There was something about the way she was acting now that seemed a little more sinister than I'd expected of the Doctor. I began to wish I'd not skipped to the end of that BoB playlist, but watched everything on it lest it would've given me some sort of clue.
"I've taken that pesky Doctor out of things entirely," she smirked, head lolling to one side. "The time streams just take a little while to correct themselves. Especially in York. Nothing ever changes very quickly in York."
"That's why there was still physical evidence here in the Library?"
"Who's a little clever-clogs?", she chuckled, prodding me in the forehead.
I tried to make sense of what I was hearing. There had been a series called 'Doctor Who' but it was actually snippets of real-life events recorded to an alien repository. These had been intercepted by UNIT and broadcast as fiction in order to discredit claims of alien activity on Earth (including the exploits of the Doctor). And now this intervention (or certain parts of it) had been unpicked by the woman standing in front of me... just a few inches in front of me. And now I knew everything that had gone on. Well, not everything, but a fair bit... A dangerous proportion! If huge swathes of television broadcasting could be unwritten, then surely so could I!
And yet it had not entirely been unwritten. It was still here. In York. Protected by those ancient walls. And now I also began to feel it in my head: I could feel memories I'd forgot I'd had, lurking at the back of my mind... sleeping. I knew I had to wake them up: to bring them back in front of my eyes. I had... to remember... 'Doctor Who'... Not just the episodes I'd seen on Box of Broadcasts. Not just the stuff I'd read in the books. No. I had seen it all. I had seen Doctor Who! I remembered! Human-sized moth creatures, Yetis on the underground, great big maggots, standing stones that could drink blood, massive pink snakes, walking plants, cat people, some bloke who always liked to dress for the occasion (not sure what that was about), flatulent bodysnatchers, tig-playing statues, lizard people, a kid under a blanket... My mind raced with these recollections!
I looked at the woman stood in front of me: Missy. It was Missy — The Master — the Doctor's greatest enemy-slash-friend. I spoke as boldly as I could: "You can take the girl out of York, but you can't take York out of the girl!" I must confess, I didn't know where I was going with this, but I felt strangely confident that whatever ancient forces had protected York from the timeline interference were now also protecting me.
Missy scowled at me, and was just about to say something really scathing when she faded out of existence. York was refusing to be rewritten, and my presence in that time machine was causing some sort of interference. I felt peculiar and stretched my arm out to the control console to steady myself. As I made contact with the panel, a huge jolt of energy surged through me, and the console sparked with a brilliant green flash.
What happened after that, I don't know. My body had decided that this would be a convenient point in the plot for it to fall unconscious...
I was awoken by the strangest sensation at my ear: a sort of gentle hissing and light nibbling. I opened my eyes, tentatively, but all I could see was the blue of the sky. Blinking, I peered at whatever was prodding at my ear. It was a tiny duck.
"SUB-JECT IS A-LIVE!" came a tin voice from my left. I snapped my head around to see a small robot rocking from side to side. I sat up, somewhat bewildered, and took in my surroundings. Me, the robot, and the duck were all on the Fairhurst lawn. In the distance, one of the local rabbits was chewing at a dock leaf.
Then a curious gent with a pleasant open face appeared in my peripheral vision. There was something familiar about that face. "Doctor...?" I asked, quietly.
He chuckled. "J.B. Morrell, at your service. As ever I am..."
He proffered a hand towards me. I took it to shake it, but instead he helped me up off the ground. The duck flapped down to the ground and stood with the robot at the man's feet.
"I took the liberty of restoring the time streams as they had been before any 'unfortunate' interventions took place. I hope that wasn't an impertinence on my part?"
"Far from it!" I assured him. I looked about to check that everything was where I thought it should be. It was. "But how...?"
J.B. Morrell pointed towards the building that bears his name. "Good Library, that. There's more knowledge in there than you'd think. It's bigger on the inside than it is on the out."
"You mean with all the online resources as well as the physical stock?" I asked, naïvely.
He chuckled again. "If you like; if you like!" And then he walked away, the duck flapping merrily behind him. The robot turned its head. "Come along, Java!" called J.B. Morrell, and the robot rolled away after him, across the grass.
Absently, I looked over at the Library buildings, and suddenly remembered that somewhere in there my tea was getting cold. I turned back to thank J.B. Morrell and his friends, but, inevitably, they were nowhere to be seen. I dusted myself off, took a deep breath of fresh air, and headed back inside the Library, resolving to check that all the Doctor Who stuff I'd seen in there before was still there now. It's something I urge you to check too. Just in case. You never know when someone might try to tamper with history again...
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