Before the TARDIS

The BBC uncovered lots of stuff from its Doctor Who archives about the original concepts behind Doctor Who.

You can see all the new archived stuff right here

And below is an article covering this new addition!

Dusted Off

The Doctor without his time-travelling police box is difficult to imagine, but its creators initially proposed he journey through space in an invisible machine covered in light-resistant paint... viewers should see no machine at all, only "a shape of nothingness".

The BBC's head of drama insisted an invisible machine would not work and the doctor's vehicle should be a strong visual symbol. Wisely, writers also said a transparent, plastic bubble would be "lowgrade". But a seed of the Tardis idea is sown when they suggest using "some common object in the street"

Sydney Newman

These discussions are revealed in six previously unpublished documents, now digitised on the BBC Archive website. These include handwritten notes by Mr Newman, regarded by fans as the genius behind the original concept.

At the start, the writer Cecil Webber describes the Doctor as follows:

"A frail old man lost in space and time. They give him this name because they don't know who he is. He seems not to remember where he has come from: he is suspicious and capable of sudden malignance; he seems to have some undefined enemy; he is searching for something as well as fleeing from something. He has a 'machine' which enables them to travel together through time, through space and through matter."

It's hardly heroic but that description, apart from being frail, fits David Tennant perfectly. He's quite unforgiving and it's up to humans to remind him of his moral duty. That first description of the Doctor, played initially by an old-looking William Hartnell, still holds true today and his mystique is one of the show's guiding principles.

"The suspiciousness is something that's passed on through the years and the undefined enemy is things going wrong with the universe. And the mystery as well. It's not just a question mark, but the character itself - who is he? If that's ever resolved in the series, then that's the day it fails."

But what about the ideas that didn't make it?

Mr Newman scribbled "Nuts!" next to the suggestion that the Doctor's secret mission was to meddle with time and destroy the future. But six years later, an element of that was worked into the plot when the Time Lords arrived.

Mr Newman insisted that the show educate and inform, as well as entertain. Hence scenes where science teacher Ian discussed the property of acid on a planet, or history teacher Barbara enlightened viewers about the Aztecs.

But even Mr Newman's foresight failed him on occasion. One of the cardinal rules for the new show, spelled out in one of the newly-released documents, is "No Bug-Eyed Monsters" - which Newman abbreviated to "No BEMs" - and no tin robots. He was therefore angry to find that rule had been broken to accommodate tin-can baddies armed with plungers, called Daleks.

Even geniuses can get some things wrong.

Read the full article right here

I advise you go have a snoop about the archives, they're fantastic!