A Word on William Hartnell

A Word on William Hartnell

In keeping with the tradition I established when Verity left, cast and crew of particular importance will get one of these “A Word on” posts. Actors who play the Doctor are a no-brainer inclusion, of course, and for them these posts will double as a long-winded retrospective and round-up of the era.

Where to start? First, with a doff of my cap to a man who gave everything he had to a role that he loved, and more than that, one which he defined and which has kept going strong for almost sixty years now. That’s no mean feat, and it’s all owed to Hartnell’s dedication and skill as a character actor. His ability to infuse the Doctor with charm, whimsy, mystery, and occasionally menace, is something to behold, and it set a high bar for all who followed in his footsteps. He also had an impressive knack for bringing out the best in other gifted actors while on screen with them, and upping his own game in turn. For all that he was evidently a difficult person to work with, he does seem to elevate the whole production every time he’s on screen.

I watched An Adventure in Space and Time for this marathon just after finishing The Tenth Planet, and had originally intended to do a full write-up post, but after a bit of rumination I decided that anything of worth I had to say about it could be boiled down to a paragraph or two, and would be appropriate to include in this wrap-up anyway. It is a lovely piece of drama, and I’m not too proud to admit I misted up. I do have to say that it is a rather sanitized depiction of the era, and it does seem to imply that everything after Verity left was crap… The whole truth is a lot messier, and Bill Hartnell’s story was nowhere near this clean. As much as I can laud his skill as an actor, his problems with people of color are now well-known, and he could be beastly to his fellow cast members. He was a complicated man, and this is a complicated story; it’s hard knowing an actor you admire was not altogether a good human being, but that’s life.

To move the focus from the man to the episodes, then, I have to say that my overall impression of this era was strongly positive. The variety, the sheer fun, and the magic of it all kept me in high spirits every time I sat down to watch, and while a number of individual episodes weren’t good, I was very rarely bored. The trial and error, the sense of invention, and the gradual sense of the program finding its place have all proved fascinating to behold, and a number of classic stories have been sprinkled in along the way.

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Here is how I would rank all of the stories, in terms of the scores I gave while viewing them. Keep in mind that some of these serials were given their ratings two years ago. In the interest of integrity, I have chosen not to adjust any scores once I reach the end of a given season, even if my opinions have shifted a little, just to keep things nice and simple. Accordingly, a few stories like The Daleks would have gone up a little, and I would have been somewhat more charitable to The Space Museum in light of the actually-probably-worse The Celestial Toymaker, but there’s no use going the route of Light in Ghost Light and blowing myself up over it.

1. The Aztecs - 10.00
2. The Myth Makers - 9.75
3. The Time Meddler - 9.50
4. The War Machines - 9.00
5. Marco Polo - 9.00
6. An Unearthly Child - 9.00
7. The Dalek Invasion of Earth - 8.83
8. The Savages - 8.75
9. The Massacre - 8.75
10. The Edge of Destruction - 8.50
11. The Daleks' Master Plan - 8.08
12. The Rescue - 8.00
13. The Romans - 8.00
14. Mission to the Unknown - 8.00
15. The Tenth Planet - 7.75
16. Planet of Giants - 7.67
17. The Crusade - 7.50
18. The Daleks - 7.14
19. The Gunfighters - 7.00
20. Galaxy 4 - 6.25
21. The Web Planet - 6.17
22. The Keys of Marinus - 6.17
23. The Sensorites - 6.17
24. The Chase - 6.00
25. The Ark - 6.00
26. The Reign of Terror - 5.83
27. The Smugglers - 5.75
28. The Celestial Toymaker - 4.25
29. The Space Museum - 3.75

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I’ve also been considering my estimation of the Doctor’s companions so far. It is still early days, so the top ten list format which I’ll be using is not yet all that illustrative, but I hope it will serve me well in the times to come. Fittingly, as there are a whopping ten companions for this period, here are the Hartnell companions, ranked as they stand after The Tenth Planet:

1. Barbara Wright
2. Steven Taylor
3. Vicki Pallister
4. Ian Chesterton
5. Susan Foreman
6. Polly Wright
7. Sara Kingdom
8. Ben Jackson
9. Dodo Chaplet
10. Katarina

I find this ordering pretty easy to rationalize. Barbara seems to top this sort of list for almost everybody, and justifiably so, as she is brilliant. A bright and witty character played by the absolutely inimitable Jacqueline Hill, nobody else even came close to troubling her positioning on my list. She’s in a league of her own.

Trailing, then, we find Steven, played by Peter Purves, who I consider to be massively underrated. Possibly this is on account of so many of his episodes being missing, but he’s dependable and likable, and charmed me quite a bit. His role in challenging and butting heads with the Doctor from time to time always kept my interest, and he has had a very interesting afterlife in the expanded universe.

Just slightly behind him is Vicki, played by the irrepressibly charming Maureen O’Brien. Vicki has a youthful, 1960s vitality about her that makes her impossible to forget. She blazed the trail for so many other young woman companions to follow, and as I pointed out a few times in Season Two, I enjoy her role as the Doctor’s apprentice, of sorts. It’s a pity her time on the show was so rudely truncated.

I feel a little guilty rating Ian below Barbara, as the two are inseparable and exist only as a unit. When pressed to rank them individually, though, Ian does lack some of Barbara’s magic in my mind. Like Steven he plays the likable, dependable role well, and William Russell is good, but he lacks a lot of Jacqueline Hill’s range and (in my humble estimation) would have worked better in a “companion’s companion” role such as modern characters like Mickey or Rory.

Ringing up the last of the three original companions of the Doctor, we find Susan, played by Carole Ann Ford. While her brightness and the mysterious “unearthly” qualities she shows off at first are very arresting, I was disappointed to find that the scripts Susan was given very rarely lived up to that promise, and she left the show without ever really realizing her potential. This uneven treatment is a shame, as Susan might have wound up higher in my estimation otherwise.

It’s very early days for Polly and Ben, so their positions may yet shift. For now, I’m comfortable putting Anneke Wills’ Polly here, as while she shows a lot of promise and is immensely vivacious and likable, she has yet to make enough of an impression for me to place her much higher.

Sara Kingdom surprised me somewhat, as despite being present for less than an entire serial and not given very much breathing room for characterization, Jean Marsh acts her well, and she, like Steven, has also had an interesting afterlife. She doesn’t get enough time in the sun to justify a place much higher than this, but I do like her quite a bit.

As with Ian, it’s a little silly to separate Ben from Polly as they are a unit, but for the moment Michael Craze’s Ben lags somewhat behind Polly for me. Not enough to really be explained by any specific flaw, but until we get more episodes with him he won’t quite break into the big leagues.

Poor Dodo. Jackie Lane is not a poor actress by any means, but as I’ve gone into at length by this point, her character was not served well by nearly any of the scripts she was given. At least she’s earned the dignity of not quite dropping into last place.

Does Katarina even count? It could be argued six ways to Sunday, and I doubt any consensus would ever be reached. Like Jackie Lane, Adrienne Hill was certainly not a poor actress, but it really feels like they did not give any thought or effort to Katarina before it was time to kill her. It’s sort of distasteful, really. No one should be very surprised when Katarina and Dodo drop off this list once I do this again at the end of Troughton.

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Lastly, I thought it would be a nice idea at the close of each era to highlight just five of that Doctor’s best moments. This is a challenge given that every Doctor will have so very many, but it will be interesting trying to pinpoint the ones that stuck the most in my mind, and which distill the things that make that era of the show so special. Here are my picks for the Hartnell era in chronological order:

Have you ever thought what it's like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? (An Unearthly Child)

One day, I shall come back. (The Dalek Invasion of Earth)

[The Doctor fools the Monk, trapping him in 1066.] (The Time Meddler)

Perhaps I should go home, back to my own planet. But I can't. I can't. (The Massacre)

There's something very satisfying in destroying something that's evil, don't you think? (The Savages)

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I have gone on and on, but that’s all I have for now. It’s been a blast, but now that I’ve tipped my hat to the Hartnell era, it’s time to usher in the next. This chapter may be over, but the adventure goes on and on, forever.

“Our destiny is in the stars, so let's go and search for it.”

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 11 May 2020.)