The day after a president was shot
Doctor Who began on 23 November 1963, the day after the American president John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Many viewers were watching the news instead, and power cuts hit parts of Britain that evening, so the BBC showed the first episode again the following week, just before the second. The show about a mysterious traveller in time and space, called only the DOCTOR, went on to become the longest-running science fiction television series in the world. Its eerie electronic theme has a remarkable story of its own, told on our electronic music page.
A new face to replace a sick actor
The first Doctor was played by William Hartnell, who by 1966 was in poor health and struggling to remember his lines. Rather than end the show, the producers came up with an idea that has kept it going ever since. The Doctor is a TIME LORD from the planet GALLIFREY, and when dying can REGENERATE into a new body, with a new face and a new personality. Over sixty years, more than fifteen actors have played the role. In 2017 Jodie Whittaker became the first woman to play the Doctor, and in 2023 Ncuti Gatwa became the first Black actor to lead the show.
The show was cancelled in 1989 and returned with a one-off film in 1996, before being brought back as a full series in 2005, which is when many of today's fans, known as a WHOVIAN, first found it.
Bigger on the inside
The Doctor's time machine, the TARDIS, short for Time And Relative Dimension In Space, is much bigger on the inside than the outside. Its disguise was supposed to change to blend in wherever it landed, but it got stuck looking like a blue POLICE BOX, a kind of telephone kiosk that British police used in the 1950s and 1960s. Real police boxes vanished from the streets, but the TARDIS made the shape famous. In 2002 the BBC won a long legal argument with the Metropolitan Police over who had the right to use the design on merchandise.
The Doctor's gadget is a SONIC screwdriver, and the Doctor usually travels with a COMPANION, such as ROSE, DONNA, AMY, CLARA and YAZ, as well as CAPTAIN Jack. The Doctor's old rival, another renegade Time Lord, is called the MASTER.
Behind the sofa
The DALEK, a killer from the planet SKARO in a metal shell shaped like a pepper pot, first appeared in December 1963 and made the show a hit; children famously hid behind the sofa when they came on. Their harsh voices were made by passing actors' voices through an electronic device called a ring modulator. The CYBERMAN, a human who has replaced body parts with metal and lost all feeling, and the SONTARAN, a warrior clone with a head shaped like a potato, are among the Doctor's other enemies.
The lost episodes
Many early episodes are missing, because the BBC wiped or threw away tapes in the 1960s and 1970s to save space; some have been found since, including nine episodes discovered in a television station in Nigeria in 2013. The GALAXY and the time VORTEX are the rest of the grid.