An Invisible TARDIS? A Technophobic Doctor? The Original 1963 Pitch Unearthed

Andrew Reynolds is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

In this business known as show, there are many creative cul-de-sacs and blind alleys to traverse before stumbling upon something that bears all the hallmarks of greatness.

While we’ve come to recognise what makes Doctor Who the show that it is – a renegade Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey who travels in time and space in his police box shaped time machine, the TARDIS, with an assortment of companions – it wasn’t always like that.

No, as documents – which include handwritten notes by Sydney Newman – unearthed by a fan have shown, during the development of the show, the Doctor was a human and a cranky old luddite who travelled in an invisible time bubble actively destroying the future by sabotaging the past.

Yes, that is a bit different and in the handwritten scrawl of Sydney Newman, it was also ‘nuts’!

Take for instance, the description of the original TARDIS. Instead of the iconic police box, we get, well, nothing.

“We do not see the machine at all; or rather it is visible only as an absence of visibility, a shape of nothingness (Inlaid, into surrounding picture). Dr. Who has achieved this “disappearance” by covering the outside with light—resistant paint (a recognised research project today). Thus our characters can bump into it, run their hands over its shape, partly disappear by partly entering it, and disappear entirely when the door closes behind them.”

But what about the First Doctor’s attempts to nullify the future?

“He can get into a rare paddy when faced with a cave man trying to invent a wheel. He malignantly tries to stop progress (the future) wherever he finds it, while searching for his ideal (the past). This seems to me to involve slap up-to-date moral problems, and old ones too.”

Then there’s the section from C.E Webber’s original treatment which provoking Sydney Newman to question his writer’s sanity.

“The authorities of his own (or some other future) time are not concerned merely with the theft of an obsolete machine; they are seriously concerned to prevent his monkeying with time, because his secret intention, when he finds his ideal past, is to destroy or nullify the future.”

It’s an interesting glimpse into the past and you can read the full pitch here or see the documents here – imagine if it hadn’t been for Newman’s general disgust with the ideas and the subsequent changes thereafter; we could have been watching William Hartnell as an angry human rallying against the encroaching evils of technology in his invisible time machine.

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