DOCTOR WHO-AN ADVENTURE IN SPACE AND TIME

A BBC film crew was lucky enough to shoot the Doctor's first meeting
with the dreaded Daleks

Contrary to popular belief, Doctor Who-An Adventure in Space and Time is not a biopic on the early days of the BBC tv show Doctor Who. No, rather it is a bona fide Doctor Who episode featuring the First Doctor and his original companions Ian, Barbara and Susan.

However, it is set in an alternate reality where the world of the Doctor converge with the real world of 1960s England and the daily travails of producing an amibitous TV show about a time travelling old man and his police box. Very much like Inferno the Doctor has crossed boundaries of space and time and entered a parallel world where he was actually perceived as a fictional character portrayed by typecast character actor William Hartnell.

It only looks like a biopic because that's what Doctor Who does best: make up any sort of programme and then throw the Doctor and his chums in to see what happens. He's done it before, you see. The Doctor has crashed murder mysteries (even one with Agatha Christie herself), Gothic horror movies, Star Wars-like space opera, one of those Greek mythology thingie, a western, a modern-day spy action series with aliens and others as well.

On most occasions, the Doctor is savvy enough to instantly know the rules of the programmes he's crashing, but not this time. Sure, he once inserted himself in someone else's biography (i.e. Marco Polo) but now it's about his own life and we find the Doctor something at a loss. That's why, at some point, we see him standing in front of the control console, completely lost, unable to remember what he's supposed to do. To the point where he needed his eleventh incarnation to anchor things a bit. This must have been extremely confusing for him. Here he was, a Time Lord seen as an unwell, cranky fiftysomething on the comeback trail.

Space and Time offers us the first double narrative in Doctor Who. On one hand we see the Doctor/William Hartnell engaged with Verity Lambert, Sidney Newman, Waris Hussein, William Russell, Mervyn Pinfield, Jacqueline Hill and Carole Ann Ford in producing the Doctor's adventures and on the other hand, we see highlights of the Doctor's most exciting journeys: in prehistoric times, on Skaro, in 13th century China, on planet Vortis and, finally, at Snowcap Tracking Station in 1986 where he met the Cybermen for the first time, and regenerated into his second persona. Luckily, the space-time continuum allowed a BBC production crew film these for all to see.

For the Doctor, however, it's all too much. We see him lose and gain companions at an alarming rate and the years go by around him while he stays the same. It wears a bit thin after a while and he finally relents, agreeing to let go in favour of his second incarnation (who, due to the dimensional gap, is perveived to be younger, fresher and much in-demand character actor Pat Troughton).

Most alarming is the Doctor's inability to understand the rules of the biopic genre. Hartnell's most desperate battles against John Wiles and Innes Lloyd (who succeeded Verity Lambert as producers) are absent, as well as story editors David Whitaker, Dennis Spooner, Donald Tosh and Gerry Davis. The companions, after the holy quartet had come and gone, are reduced to publicity photo cameos. Entire adventures are not even mentioned, let alone protrayed on screen, because the film is only an hour-and-a-half long, and not twenty-six consecutive years of space-time adventures.