|
|
 My first taste of Doctor Who from the Sixties At this point my acceptance
of regeneration and the periodic change of lead actor was established, as
we were already into the Sylvester McCoy era, but my exposure to the
first, second and third incarnations of the Doctor was still limited. If I
remember correctly, the sequence in which I first experienced the first
three Doctors was in reverse order, i.e. Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton
and finally Bill Hartnell. I’ve already recounted my Pertwee initiation,
and the first time I saw a Patrick Troughton episode was probably only a
few days later. The story in question was The Seeds of Death, the
first Trougton story released on BBC Video and the only second Doctor
story available on VHS for years afterwards.
difference between the sixties and seventies Doctor Who was the 405-line broadcast system which left far more to the imagination as far as the detail and clarity was concerned, and coupled with the fact that these were lower quality film recordings rather than being taken from the original videotapes, it presented a far more eerie image to me. The sound quality on the original video release of The Seeds of Death is not exactly crystal clear either, so this also added to the much more mysterious feel of it than any other Doctor Who I had seen up to that point. Although the picture and sound quality were inferior compared to what I was used to, I thoroughly enjoyed the story, and particularly the fun team of Troughton, Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury. A couple of years later The Daleks from 1963 became the first Bill Hartnell story that I watched, and this was an even more surreal experience. The much more primitive but strange title sequence had me gasping when I first saw it, and the theme music seemed so much more haunting than the more regular and upbeat version that I knew from the 1970’s. I thought William Hartnell was astounding as the Doctor, and in a way eclipsed all subsequent actors in the role. It was also the landmark story which introduced the Daleks to us for the first time, and so it was a classic first slice of the earliest days of the programme for me. However, by this time my appreciation for the show was beginning to change. No longer was it simply the scary, wide-eye inducing, adrenaline-pumping Saturday serving of drama that it used to be. Now it was becoming far more interesting. Next Episode: The Doctor Grows Up With Me
|
The
most obvious difference between this and any other Doctor Who story
that I had seen previously was that it was in black and white rather than
colour. Ironically, the first few years that I had watched the programme
was on a black and white television set (as pictured here, sat on a shelf
behind my sister and I as we pose with one of our Spanish au pairs) even
though it had been transmitted in colour since January 1970. I therefore
had a strange sort of back-to-front experience between first watching the
colour episodes of Tom Baker in monochrome, then Jon Pertwee in colour and
ultimately Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell in true black-and-white
episodes. Colour transmission aside, the other main visual