100,000 B.C.

An Unearthly Child is the serial that started it all — four episodes broadcast between 23 November and 14 December 1963 that launched one of the most enduring science-fiction series in television history. Sixty years on, it remains essential viewing.

Episode One: An Unearthly Child

The first episode is a near-perfect piece of television. We meet Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford), a brilliant but oddly otherworldly pupil at Coal Hill School, and her two puzzled schoolteachers: science teacher Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and history teacher Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill). Following Susan home to a junkyard at 76 Totters Lane, Ian and Barbara discover the impossible: a battered police box that is in fact a dimensionally transcendent spacecraft called the TARDIS, belonging to Susan’s mysterious grandfather — a white-haired, imperious old man who goes only by “the Doctor” (William Hartnell).

The character dynamics established here are immediate and compelling. The Doctor is not presented as a hero; he is prickly, secretive, and more than a little dangerous. When he refuses to let Ian and Barbara leave with knowledge of the TARDIS, he takes off into the vortex — kidnapping them, in effect. It is a morally ambiguous introduction that sets the tone for the troubled early relationship between the Doctor and his unwanted passengers.

Episodes Two to Four: The Stone Age

The remaining three episodes shift to 100,000 B.C., depositing the TARDIS crew in the middle of a crisis among a tribe of primitive humans. Za (Derek Newark) and Kal (Jeremy Young) are competing to become leader of the tribe, with the secret of fire — lost since the death of the previous leader — as the prize. The TARDIS travellers are captured and used as pawns in this brutal struggle for power.

The caveman storyline is a step down in quality from the brilliant opening episode. The plot is somewhat repetitive — capture, escape, capture again — and the Stone Age setting, while atmospheric, limits what the characters can do. However the serial serves its purpose admirably: it establishes the format of the show (the TARDIS lands somewhere unexpected, the crew must survive and eventually escape), tests the relationships between the four regulars under pressure, and demonstrates that the programme will not shy away from showing real danger and moral complexity.

Hartnell is magnificent throughout. His Doctor here is no avuncular hero but a selfish, cunning survivor who gradually, grudgingly, begins to value his companions. The moment he nearly uses a rock to kill an injured caveman — and is stopped by Ian — is genuinely shocking even today.

Historical Significance

An Unearthly Child arrived the day after the assassination of President Kennedy, and its transmission was delayed and then repeated the following week when audiences missed it. Despite the troubled launch it caught on, and what followed — the Daleks, regeneration, fifty-plus years of storytelling — makes this humble first serial one of the most important pieces of British television ever made. Essential.