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Posted: |
Nov 12, 2013 - 8:15 PM
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By: |
johnjohnson
(Member)
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The drama An Adventure in Space and Time, which tells the story of the creation of Doctor Who in 1963 in fictionalised form, received a standing ovation from the audience following its première at the British Film Institute on Tuesday evening. An Adventure, produced by the BBC as part of the celebrations to mark Doctor Who's 50th anniversary this month, will receive its television début on BBC Two on Thursday 21st November at 9pm, before being shown in the US and Canada the following day, and in Australia on the 24th.
Tuesday's screening was the latest in the BFI's own series of anniversary events, which have previously seen each Doctor celebrated with a screening of one of their stories. The screening of An Adventure in Space and Time proved immensely popular with fans, some of whom had waited for eight hours in the queue for returns in order to gain their seats. The screening was introduced by speeches from its writer and executive producer Mark Gatiss, from the BFI's Television Programmer Malcolm Prince and from Clare Hudson, the Head of BBC Cymru Wales productions, which made An Adventure in Space and Time.
Among the audience were director Waris Hussein, who appears as a character in the drama played by Sacha Dhawan; former companion actors Carole Ann Ford (also a character in the programme) Louise Jameson, Anneke Wills (who also appears briefly in the drama), Sophie Aldred and Matthew Waterhouse, and 1970s producer Philip Hinchcliffe. Taking part in the panel discussion following the screening, conducted by journalist and Doctor Who fan Matthew Sweet, were Gatiss, stars Dhawan and David Bradley (who portrays William Hartnell), director Terry McDonough and Hartnell's real-life granddaughter Jessica Carney, the latter of whom was clearly very moved by the drama.
http://www.doctorwhonews.net/2013/11/adventure-ovation-13112013003115.html
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Posted: |
Nov 12, 2013 - 8:19 PM
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By: |
johnjohnson
(Member)
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Review.
There are many things in life, in art and in drama that can provoke emotion. It’s probably safe to say that a car’s tax disc is not usually one of them.
However, I feel almost certain that I can guarantee no Doctor Who fan of long-standing will be able to avoid at least a little twitch, a certain emotional pang in the opening moments of An Adventure in Space and Time at the date on a disc which comes into shot, and what it signifies. It’s a brief moment, one among many that will mean nothing to the general audience, but adds an extra layer for anybody who has a familiarity with the show we all hold so dear.
I am a grown man, not often given to tears, but I must confess that sitting in the back row at the BFI this evening, just that brief shot made me well up a little. It’s probably no surprise, therefore – as pathetic as it sounds, and I do realise how odd it must seem to some – that I found myself crying real tears come the end. I was taken aback myself. I’d been looking forward to this drama a great deal, and for a long time. But perhaps foolishly, I hadn’t expected to find it as affecting as I did.
I have been utterly fascinated by the creation of Doctor Who, and the many and varied interlinked stories behind it, almost ever since I can remember. Part of the appeal of the fiction of the series when I was a very small child was always how much of a mystery it was, how there was so much mythology and so much backstory that I could only ever seem to have tantalising little glimpses of from BBC repeats or the occasional video borrowed or purchased.
But gradually, the real-life history began to interest me too. I can’t pinpoint exactly when it was – perhaps when I was seven years old and BBC Two showed an edit of the pilot recording as part of The Lime Grove Story. Perhaps when my parents bought me Doctor Who – The Sixties for Christmas at the age of nine, the year of the programme’s thirtieth anniversary – a frightening 20 years ago now!
I read that book again and again, despite having at the time seen hardly any of the episodes the making of which it chronicled. But I think the book that really made me realise what a great narrative there is to the creation of Doctor Who back in 1963 was The Handbook: The First Doctor by David J Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker. I bought a copy in 1997, and was riveted by the “Production Diary” section, which tells the story of how Doctor Who came to be created using the memos, letters, format documents and various other pieces of paper preserved in the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham.
There’s something captivating about the story for so many reasons. A big part of it is because we now know what the legend was that they were about to launch. Partly also it’s because of the huge challenges the first production team faced, and how so many times it seemed as if the series wouldn’t even make it to the screen, or past its first few episodes. It’s also to do with the varied personalities involved, changing times at the BBC as it moved into the sixties and the drama department changed and evolved… And also, no doubt, a nostalgic interest in the way television was made long ago, if you can be nostalgic for a time long before you were even born!
I knew that it was a great story, and one you could tell as a drama, and of course I was very far from being the first to have that idea. Back in the thirtieth anniversary year, 1993, Kevin Davies had come up with a notion called The Legend Begins, which would have mixed interviews with those responsible for Doctor Who’s creation with a dramatised strand, showing how it all happened with actors in the roles of those well-known names.
This project never came to pass, and Davies eventually made Thirty Years in the TARDIS for BBC One instead, as a (relatively!) straightforward documentary. But with the fortieth anniversary coming up in 2003, Mark Gatiss had a similar idea – to tell the story of the beginnings of Doctor Who as a drama. It never got anywhere, and I remember reading Gatiss’s Doctor Who Magazine feature interview that year, where he spoke about the idea, and I felt sad that it hadn’t come to pass.
Possibly inspired by reading that, I even had a go at writing the story myself, as a novel called 1963. It was rejected by various agents and publishers (probably for the best!), but I was thrilled in 2012 when it was announced that the story was at last to be told in fictionalised form. The BBC had commissioned Gatiss to dust off his old idea for the fiftieth anniversary, and An Adventure in Space and Time was born.
I eagerly, perhaps even obsessively, hoovered up every detail of the production as and when they became available, poured over every on-set photo and read and re-read every interview. It’s long been one the highlights of the anniversary season that I have been looking forward to the most, so I was deliriously happy when I got the chance to attend the premiere screening at the British Film Institute in London, as a reviewer for this website.
After all that waiting, all of that build-up, and having a reasonably good grounding in the real history behind it all… how does An Adventure measure up?
It’s a hop-skip-and-jump through the early history of Doctor Who, but of course it had to be, and I went in knowing that full-well. Those endless reams of documentation and memos of which I spoke are endlessly fascinating to people like me, and perhaps you, and I’m sure to Gatiss as well, but would make for pretty interminable viewing for the average viewer to which BBC Two really have to be reaching out.
Nobody wants to see 90 minutes of people reading detailed BBC documentation to one another. Nonetheless, I was pleased to see that we do get flashes of dialogue between characters that some will recognise from some of those memos that were flying about during the creation of the show – I was particularly pleased that Donald Wilson’s (sadly absent here as a character) note to the editor of the Radio Times about the show being a “knock-out” survives in a line given to Verity Lambert, for example.
Wilson is not the only character to be absent, and like fans perhaps mourning the absence of classic series Doctors from the forthcoming Day of the Doctor, many of us will have favourites who we feel were perhaps worthy of greater recognition, or who have been overlooked. Gatiss himself, in the panel session which followed the screening, mourned the absence of David Whitaker, as he had also done in other interviews prior to the screening.
But part of the problem of the story of the birth of Doctor Who is that it involves so many people, and has so many great stories and sub-plots within it. You could have a whole drama about the work of the Radiophonic Workshop, or about the roles of Raymond Cusick and Terry Nation in creating the Daleks.
What we have here is a condensed, simplified version of Doctor Who’s beginnings painted in broad strokes, with the order of events streamlined and in some cases moved around a little. In fact, there’s even an argument for saying that this isn’t about the creation of Doctor Who at all – it already exists within the first few minutes of the drama, and most of what follows is about the process of actually getting the idea made.
In a lot of the promotion and build-up to An Adventure in Space and Time, it has been promoted as the story of four extraordinary people and how they combined to create a television legend – Sydney Newman, Lambert, Waris Hussein and William Hartnell. I would suggest that this is not quite the case. Newman’s role is really a supporting one, and while there is some focus early in the piece on the relationship between Lambert and Hussein, really it’s Hartnell’s piece, and David Bradley delivers a suitably towering performance in the part. All of the cast are good, but he is especially so, utterly convincing both as the Doctor and, as we now have a little more insight into from the Points West interview, as Hartnell outside of the role. Indeed, a line from that interview even makes it into his dialogue early on, which I thought was a nice touch.
But it’s a piece full of nice touches, none more so than at the end. Before the screening started, we were kindly and rightly asked by the BFI’s Television Programmer Marcus Prince not to share any spoiler details of the drama, and I do not intend to do so here. Indeed, I really, truly hope you don’t see any details about the ending before you see the programme, and are able to come to it fresh – you’ll find it so much more rewarding if you do. I shall simply say that it did not end in the way I had expected, and the way in which it did finish hit me so hard that the tears did indeed begin to flow.
It’s ridiculous. Ludicrous. It’s just a children’s programme that we all enjoy watching. But it was a perfect moment, one that thoroughly deserves to go unspoiled.
I suspect many of the rest of the audience shared my appreciation for it, given the reaction as the end credits rolled. This is the fourth of these 50th anniversary screenings at the BFI which I have attended, but it was the first at which there was a standing ovation as the programme finished.
During the panel, both Bradley and director Terry McDonough said how flattered and moved they had been by the reaction, and McDonough told the audience he’d never been at a screening before where he felt those watching were so engaged with what they were viewing. McDonough deserves praise for his work here, in return – there is a particularly impressive sequence set on the 22nd of November, where what you think you’re watching turns out to be something quite different. You get the feeling from one or two comments that were made during the discussion following the screening that they would have liked to have had a bigger budget, but no lack of effort was visible on screen. Gatiss described one moment he would have liked to have included, during which he mentioned that the final episode of The Daleks’ Master Plan was missing “at the moment,” which prompted laughter from an audience clearly well-versed in the constant merry-go-round of missing episode speculation and rumour!
The panel itself was also a joy, conducted by journalist, broadcaster and well-known Doctor Who fan Matthew Sweet. Joining Bradley and McDonough were Gatiss himself, Sacha Dhawan (who played Waris Hussein) and William Hartnell’s granddaughter, Jessica Carney. Carney had needed to leave the auditorium for a short while after the drama had finished in order to compose herself, which isn’t surprising. If it made some of us feel emotional, how must it feel for her, who had such a close and personal connection to what we being shown? She even appears in the drama as a character herself, which must have been a slightly bizarre experience.
It’s clear that Gatiss wanted this to be a love letter to Doctor Who and a tribute to all of those who were involved in its creation, whether they made it onto the screen or not. It’s not a documentary representation of what happened in 1963, it was clearly never meant to be. It’s a celebration, and in that respect it hits and mark spot-on. And if it inspires a new generation to become fascinated by the history show, to learn to explore the real story of what happened, the so much the better.
http://reviews.doctorwhonews.net/2013/11/adventure-review-13112013003015.html
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Posted: |
Nov 15, 2013 - 6:57 AM
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By: |
johnjohnson
(Member)
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It sounds as though Mark Gatiss’s fascination with–and admiration for–First Doctor William Hartnell has only grown thanks to An Adventure in Space and Time. Gatiss’s upcoming docudrama about the very beginnings of Doctor Who features the character of Hartnell (as played by David Bradley) in a key role.
In a lengthy article that was published this week in The Telegraph, long-time Who writer, actor, and superfan Gatiss revealed his deep interest in the man who would be First:
William Hartnell once said ‘If I live to be 90, a little of the magic of Doctor Who will still cling to me.’ …Hartnell was out of work when the call for Doctor Who came, and he wasn’t sure about doing it because it was a children’s programme. But once he got it, he grabbed it with both hands. It made him a hero to children.
And Gatiss also seems taken by the man himself–partly because Hartnell could be such a mystifying contradiction.
He was a very difficult man, but I don’t think he was a monster. There are some hair-raising stories about his prejudices, but they feel of a piece of his generation. …He was also immensely lovable, charming, and a very good actor. The tragedy is that he was used to film. The incredible treadmill of television production…and the fact that he was ill wore him out.
Gatiss also needed to delicately balance the true-behind-the-scenes-story of what happened in the early 1960s with making an entertaining movie for modern television:
The thing that I’ve really tried to use in An Adventure in Space and Time is the idea that the Doctor makes Hartnell better. That’s what doctors do. There’s something rather lovely about that.
In conclusion, Gatiss tells his aim for the program and his portrayal of William Hartnell in the 90-minute story:
I hope that you can watch it without knowing anything about Doctor Who. It’s just the story of how something comes together-and how a man who got everything he ever wanted had to give it all away.
An Adventure in Space and Time, written by Mark Gatiss and directed by Terry McDonough, will air on BBC Two at 9pm on November 21st.
http://www.kasterborous.com/2013/11/mark-gatiss-discusses-william-hartnell/
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Posted: |
Nov 15, 2013 - 7:00 AM
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By: |
johnjohnson
(Member)
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William Hartnell once said: “If I live to be 90, a little of the magic of Doctor Who will still cling to me.” I don’t know what it is, but there is something in the fibre of the programme that is rather magical. Although Sherlock Holmes is in its DNA, and HG Wells is a source, what’s fantastic about the show is that it is a TV original, not an adaptation. It is one of the greatest single ideas that television has produced.
There’s something rather wonderful about the creation of Doctor Who, something very smoky and Novemberish. I imagine people on buses with wet raincoats, that kind of Britain. And going through it like a typhoon are two young people, Verity Lambert and Waris Hussein, with fantastic ideas, and an older man, William Hartnell, who sort of becomes young by association.
There was a New World spirit to it. Sydney Newman, the BBC’s head of drama, was a Canadian who had been brought in from ITV where he had created The Avengers. One of his many ideas, because he was a lifelong science-fiction fan, was this teatime serial called Doctor Who. Newman was very much an ideas man. He was very active in shaping a programme, but once he’d got his team together, he just let them get on with it.
Although Newman really wanted the show to work, I don’t think he would have taken a punt on Lambert, an untried 27-year-old female producer, if Doctor Who had been some kind of great flagship programme. And it’ll come as a huge surprise for most people that Hussein, the first director, was a 25-year-old Indian. Hussein says himself that he got on to the director’s course by the skin of his teeth, by playing up his Englishness. I put a little line in the script where a cameraman leans over and says “Freaks!” because I think to everyone else at the BBC, Hussein and Lambert kind of were.
I was very privileged to know Lambert a little. I wish I’d known her better. She was a force of nature, a legend really. I think until the end of her life she remained slightly bemused that despite all the incredible things she’d worked on (Lambert went on to produce several important TV dramas, including The Naked Civil Servant and GBH), it was the “little show” that people always talked about.
Hartnell was out of work when the call for Doctor Who came, and he wasn’t sure about doing it because it was a kids’ programme. But once he got it, he grabbed it with both hands. It totally changed his life. It made him a hero to children. He was adored, everywhere he went. Inevitably that does something to you. If you’re not careful, it can give you a messiah complex. If you are careful, there couldn’t be anything nicer.
Hartnell was known as a screen actor. His heyday had been in the Forties, with films like The Way Ahead and Brighton Rock. He was 55 when he got the part, the same age as new Doctor Peter Capaldi is now, but he looked 70 and rather played up to it. He was a very difficult man, but I don’t think he was a monster. There are some hair-raising stories about his prejudices, but they feel of a piece with his generation. I think my granddad was probably just as racist as Hartnell, and just as homophobic, but my granddad wasn’t Doctor Who. I’ve always been conscious, in a way, that he was slightly unfairly singled out because of who he was.
He was also immensely lovable, charming and a very good actor. The tragedy is that he was used to film. The incredible treadmill of television production, working day in and day out, and the fact he was ill wore him out. In fact, I don’t know if he ever realised how ill he was. He didn’t live a healthy life; he drank and smoked too much.
The thing I’ve really tried to use in An Adventure in Space and Time is the idea that the Doctor makes Hartnell better. That’s what doctors do. There’s something rather lovely about that.
All sorts of things went wrong during the pilot episode and they had to reshoot it (see below for a clip). I’ve slightly exaggerated some for dramatic purposes, but the sprinklers in the studio did go off when it got too hot, the Tardis doors did keep opening, and there were lots of terrifying, Acorn Antiques-like moments of camera-blocking. The main thing was that Newman thought Hartnell’s interpretation of the Doctor was too nasty – off-puttingly irascible, as opposed to grumpy. But he had the faith to tell Lambert and Hussein to do it again.
The first episode did OK, but it was broadcast on November 23, the day after the Kennedy assassination, so the world was totally traumatised. They had to repeat the first episode before screening the second. But then the Daleks came, in week five. And it went boom, just like that. There’s an entire separate film to be made about the creation of the Daleks, really – how Terry Nation, the scriptwriter, became a millionaire, and Ray Cusick, the BBC staff designer, got a Blue Peter badge and a hundred pounds. That’s fascinating, but the biggest challenge for me was paring it down and finding the essence of the drama.
Doctor Who ran until 1989, originally, which is quite incredible. Over the years you could feel when the people involved were excited and when they weren’t. But everything falls out of favour. Its time came again – when Russell T Davies fronted the 2005 revival – because it needed someone who loved it once to love it again.
I’ve had to conflate a few people here and there while writing this. As a fan, that’s difficult. But I had to obey the principles of the drama, and to make it what I wanted it to be, which is a human-interest story. I hope that you can watch it without knowing anything about Doctor Who. It’s just the story of how something comes together – and how a man who got everything he ever wanted had to give it all away.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/doctor-who/10441911/Mark-Gatiss-how-Doctor-Who-began.html
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Wait, you have watched EVERY episode of Doctor Who and it's spin-offs, meaning around 1000 individual episodes, and you dont consider yourself a fan?
Thor, that is mental!
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