On 18 Aug 2021 I started the Doctor Who marathon I talked about elsewhere on my blog.  I’m tweeting about each episode daily.  It occurred to me to collate them into posts on my blog.  Now, I don’t want to make a huge deal out of this on my blog, as I could have just written about them here in the first place.  This is just a way to show the various tweets together in one place without hunting for them on Twitter. I will probably have a little extra info here, but not a huge deal.  Mostly because I don’t want to double create the work.

An Unearthly Child

This Story: Season 1, Story 1. Production Code A
Overall: Story 1, episodes 1-4
Airdates: 23 Nov 1963 to 14 Dec 1963.
Credits: Written by Anthony Coburn.  Directed by Waris Hussein.

Episode Titles

1. An Unearthly Child
2. The Cave of Skulls
3. The Forest of Fear
4. The Firemaker

Notes

• This story is sometimes called “100,00 BC” or “The Tribe of Gum” depending on whose story you’re reading, but the official BBC designation for the four episodes is “An Unearthly Child”, which is also the name of the first episode.
• Starting with this story and running through “The Savages“, all stories have individual episode titles. After that, all stories had collective titles with “Episode 1/2, etc”…
• This story implies that at some point in the future, the UK will start using the US decimal system for money.  :)
• Greg Sutton plays “Za” in this story.  He was also in a Jon Pertwee story (“Inferno“) as Greg Sutton.
• Alethea Charlton plays “Hur” in this story.  She was also in a Jon Pertwee story (“The Time Meddler”) as Edith.
• Eileen Way played the “Old Mother” in this story.  She was in a few other Doctor Who stories as well.  She was Karela in Tom Baker’s “Creature from the Pit“.  She was also in the Peter Cushing movie “Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 AD” as “Old Woman”.
• Jeremy Young played “Kal” in this story.  He was also Gordon Lowery in the missing “Mission to the Unknown” story.  He was also married to future Doctor Who star Kate O’Mara from 1971 to 1976.
• The pilot episode of this story (Episode 1) was made, and remounted, as it was felt that the Doctor was too harsh, and there were a few technical problems.  It got re-recorded and that version is what’s been broadcast and available since.  The pilot has been freely available for some time now.
• The bones in the Cave of Skulls were apparently real bones taken from an abattoir, and were unpleasant to smell in the studio.
• When the Tardis first takes off, Ian & Barbara faint from that.  This experience is never repeated again in the series.
• In the 25th season story “Remembrance of the Daleks“, Ace and the 7th Doctor visit Coal Hill School.  In one scene, Ace picks up a book titled “The French Revolution”, implying it’s the same book that Susan Foreman had in episode 1 of this story.
• As is well known, the original broadcast of this episode was the first thing the BBC televised after wall to wall coverage of the assassination of then US President Kennedy.  Because of that, the episode was repeated immediately prior to the scheduled broadcast of Episode 2 the following week.  The next time the story was repeated (in all four parts) was 2-5 Nov 1981 was part of the “Five Faces of Doctor Who” event which was done in the time after Logopolis had aired but before Castovalva did, bridging the eras of the fourth and fifth Doctors.
• The role of Susan Foreman also had actress Jackie Lane up for it.  Lane would later join the series as Dodo Chaplet later in the Hartnell era.
• ADMIN NOTE: On 22 Mar 2026, I moved the social media posts from Twitter to BlueSky for embedding (partially because of larger text limits).  Anyway, the original Twitter posts can still be viewed on that platform.  Here are direct links to them: Episode 1 (Part 1 | Part 2) | Episode 2 (Part 1 | Part 2) | Episode 3 | Episode 4 (Part 1 | Part 2)

Links

[ Wikipedia | Tardis Wiki | SPS Historium | Amazon US DVD | Amazon UK DVD | My earlier 2012 review ]