Story: Attempting to track down anything that might bear the slightest resemblance to “definitive dates” on which Doctor Who, as a concept, was born, the book follows the careers of many key and ancillary players in the show’s gestation, combing through BBC paperwork, interviews both new and vintage, and focuses on the convergence of these talents as a vague push for more science fiction on the BBC becomes the more focused creation of one of the genre’s longest-lasting series.
Review: Well, this is a book whose subject matter is not only already fascinating, but it’s all gotten a bit more complicated since the book was released. This doesn’t mean that the book is outdated in anyway – it’s actually incredibly complete. But, as always where the TARDIS is involved, it keeps evolving.
The book’s emphasis is on the story of Doctor Who prior to its premiere. The story gets as far as the end of the four-part story we now know as An Unearthly Child, with a brief coda about the earliest appearance of the Daleks – essentially the point at which Doctor Who became a runaway success and its future, which seemed at so many points prior to and even immediately after its premiere to be quite precarious. But as is already generally known, the story begins much earlier than that – at the very least, with a 1962 report detailing possible settings and subject matter for a potential ongoing science fiction series to be determined. Pull To Open tries valiantly to find the point between that 1962 report, and the beginning of production in 1963, where the untitled project became Doctor Who, but despite the BBC’s paper trail, that specific date can’t be found.
One thing that can be found, however, is that there were a multitude of people involved in the show’s creation. While Sidney Newman seems to be universally credited as the creator of Doctor Who, here it becomes more apparent that he was a lightning rod channeling the ideas of a number of creatives around him, with final veto or approval power over such discarded elements as the Doctor hating progress and trying to prevent “the future” from happening. That’s one of a number of ideas that seem laughable now, but were seriously floated for Newman’s consideration as the show was being developed. Is Newman the show’s sole creator? Not really – but his tastes did a lot to set the parameters that laid the groundwork for Doctor Who’s future success.
In hindsight, one of the most important things in the book may be that it does a very good job of laying out writer Anthony Coburn’s role, both in refining an already-existing storyline for An Unearthly Child into the four scripts that got Doctor Who rolling, and in the impact on the show’s mythos as a whole. This becomes more important in hindsight as Coburn’s estate – with his son’s personal politics as a driving factor – decided in 2023 to hold An Unearthly Child hostage, preventing it from appearing on BBC iPlayer with the entirety of the rest of the series. This situation even necessitated trims to iPlayer’s stream of the 2013 docudrama An Adventure In Space And Time, which contained scenes dramatizing the making of An Unearthly Child. Importantly, the book lays out that Coburn started the assignment as a BBC staff writer, but completed it as a freelancer. It’s only the later status that has allowed the first four episodes of the entire series to become “newly lost episodes” not because of lost media, but due to a legal dispute. (The Coburn estate issue had not flared up at the time of the book’s writing and publication, so the book remains clinically neutral on the related topics.)
An amusing element of the book is how frequently it points out coincidental collisions in the careers of various key players in Doctor Who’s story. There are a lot of instances of this, though this is often noted as being purely coincidental (it’s not like anyone’s doing a Babylon 5 prequel movie or anything), and before you quip that humans love to see patterns in things that aren’t there, it’s clearly a byproduct of the smaller talent pool that existed in British television at the time. Even if you’re not familiar with such things as the U.K.’s Independent Television Authority, or the notion of one broadcaster programming weekdays and weeknights while another assumed responsibility for weekend programming, this is all spelled out and explained in depth. (The numerous regional independent TV franchises and their near-Byzantine overlapping areas of responsibility are one of the hardest things about British TV to explain to anyone not brought up in that system.)
One thing I did appreciate about Hayes’ book is that it very fairly credits its interview sources. The history of Doctor Who has been very heavily researched and reported upon, and while some of it has been compiled into past books such as Doctor Who: The Early Years and the “decade” books by respected Doctor Who historians Howe, Stammers & Walker, a lot of it is also scattered to disparate sources such as Doctor Who Magazine articles and interviews, and pieces printed in fanzines like Nothing At The End Of The Lane. Though Hayes has conducted a few fresh interviews of his own, one of the things that makes Pull To Open extremely valuable is pulling all of the material together in one place, for those who missed End Of The Lane entirely or don’t subscribe to DWM.
An invaluable resource, Pull To Open may fall short of its original intention – to try to nail down the precise date-of-conception of Doctor Who – but in gathering all of this information, triangulating (as best it can) the truth from conflicting sources, and being very clear when its author is interpolating and interpreting that information, the book may actually achieve something far greater than it set out to do.
Year: July 24, 2023
Author: Paul Hayes
Publisher: Ten Acre Films
Pages: 424
