It’s early Saturday evening sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s. On televisions in homes across the province, a station ID comes on, telling you that you’re watching TVOntario, channel 32 in Windsor, channel 59 in Chatham, or whichever transmitters they’re spotlighting tonight. Two colourful lines —using the slit-scan process similar to the trippy effects near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey — flow across the screen, accompanied by eerie music that causes some kids to flee behind the sofa and others to remain glued in front of the set as they anticipate the adventures to come. The walls of the lines rise, then a blue telephone booth zooms forward. After a brief trip through a time vortex, the music wails as an image of a curly-haired, scarf-wearing bohemian forms. He fades back into the vortex, and a diamond-shaped logo rushes forward bearing the show’s name: Doctor Who.
The legendary BBC sci-fi series marks its 60th anniversary this week. Between 1976 and 1992, it found a home on TVO, creating a fan base that has grown over time for a series with Ontario roots.
The son of a shoe-store owner who immigrated from Russia, Doctor Who co-creator Sydney Newman was born in Toronto on April Fools’ Day 1917. By his late teens, he was working as a commercial artist, a Financial Post cartoonist, and a theatrical set designer. When Newman was teaching weekend classes for children at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the AGO), his boss, Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer, asked whether he had ever shot a movie. After filming the class, Newman was hooked on the medium.
After failing to secure a permit to work for Walt Disney Productions, Newman joined the National Film Board of Canada in 1941 as a photographer and film splicer. During the Second World War, Newman directed instalments of Canada Carries On, a series of morale-boosting shorts spotlighting the federal war strategy. He worked closely with NFB commissioner John Grierson, who often joked that Newman had “a B-picture mentality” due to his belief in making films average viewers could relate to. From Grierson, Newman took the idea of capturing an audience within the first 60 seconds. Grierson reportedly advised, “You want to start big and then build!”
First page of a profile of Sydney Newman from Star Weekly, March 11, 1961.
When the CBC launched its television service in 1952, Newman was put in charge of remote broadcasting. He produced and directed its earliest sportscasts, including the first televised Grey Cup and the first telecast of Hockey Night in Canada originating from Maple Leaf Gardens (a 3-2 victory for the Maple Leafs over the Boston Bruins). As a supervising producer in the drama department, he oversaw a series of popular plays, usually broadcast as part of General MotorsTheatre. The most notable production was Arthur Hailey’s Flight Into Danger, whose tale of a flight endangered by food poisoning was later adapted into the films Zero Hour and Airplane!
The success of his plays drew attention from across the Atlantic, and, in 1958, he was appointed head of drama at Associated British Corporation, which held the ITV franchise for weekend broadcasting in the Midlands and northern England. His candid criticisms of British television rubbed some the wrong way, leading to nicknames like “the abominable showman” and “the crude colonial.” But he won over critics with Armchair Theatre, a series of contemporary “kitchen sink” dramas dealing with psychological and social issues that ordinary viewers found relatable. “Before this, the British working class never got into plays except as comedy relief,” Newman once observed. “Treat them seriously and you can find strong drama in their everyday lives.” By the end of 1959, Armchair Theatre was among Britain’s 10 highest-rated series. Among the other series he developed at ABC: The Avengers (not the Marvel franchise), which debuted as a straightforward crime drama in 1961 before evolving into a cult classic.
In late 1962, Newman became the BBC’s head of drama. Network veterans did not take well to hi populist philosophies. As the Globe and Mail’s Dennis Braithwaite noted in a 1963 profile, “Meeting Sydney Newman, a short, shaggy, comfortable man who wears a bow tie, wrinkled jacket and slacks, and suede shoes, it is hard to believe that he is head of drama for the august British Broadcasting Corporation. The explanation, of course, is that the BBC is not and hasn’t been for years the stuffy maiden-auntish institution pictured in British movie comedies.” Through series like The Wednesday Play, he offered an early showcase for the likes of writers Harold Pinter and Dennis Potter and director Ken Loach.
Part of an article on Doctor Who from a TVOntario supplement published in the October 9, 1976, edition of the Ottawa Journal.
“In an odd way I am not fundamentally interested in the art of television,” he wrote in the Observer in 1962. “I do like art that has something useful to say and art that is of use, whether that use is merely to give pleasure or whether it is a practical use … I think great art has to stem from the period in which it is created.” He admitted that he was “a sucker for science” and that everyone was “terrified of the things scientists are doing today. When you get into an age of nuclear physics I think the little man of today is terribly worried about what things like computers and electronic brains, let alone nuclear fallout can do. There is a tremendous need, almost a primitive urge, for understanding of these forces.”
His interest in science and science fiction came in handy when it came to one particularly problematic timeslot: a low-rated late-Saturday-afternoon series of adaptations of classic literature for children. He saw reports circulating around the BBC raising the possibility of a youth-focused science-fiction program. “I had always been intrigued by H..G. Wells’s time machine,” he observed in his autobiography Head of Drama. “It occurred to me that such a device might make the basis for a children’s serial if it had good characters in it who were in a constant state of jeopardy.”
While Newman claimed he’d written a memo to head of serials Donald Wilson outlining his ideas for the series, no such document has been found. What is definite is that the proposal was shaped into an outline by Newman, Wilson, and writer C.E. Webber by April 1963. Along the way, some ideas survived (schoolteachers as companions), while others didn’t (it was suggested that the lead character be intent on destroying the future; in response, Newman wrote “Nuts!” on the proposal sheet). It was Newman who envisioned educational elements related to history and science, wanted the lead character to be an elderly man, and came up with the idea of having a time machine that looked like a police telephone box. The end result, Doctor Who, debuted on November 23, 1963.
Just over a year later, in January 1965, the series made its Ontario debut when the CBC ran the first 26 episodes in a late-Saturday-afternoon slot. According to the Globe and Mail, the Daleks were robots who couldn’t “sing a note”; they resembled “washing machines on Blue Monday” with “one prong-like eye, a magnetized arm, and ears like tennis balls” that lit up when they talked. The announcement of the series’ pickup occurred as one of its stars was on her way to visit relatives in Toronto. “Now perhaps my Canadian in-laws will really believe me when I say I am an actress,” Jacqueline Hill, who played original companion Barbara Wright, joked to the Globe and Mail (her husband, director Alvin Rakoff, had worked under Newman at the CBC).
TVOntario Doctor Who promo, 1983
More than a decade later, TVOntario picked up the series, starting with the first part of the show’s 10-anniversary serial, “The Three Doctors,” on September 18, 1976. In an essay for a weekly TVO newspaper ad supplement, writer Jack Waterman noted the show’s tendency to drive kids behind the sofa, then discussed the series in relation to general themes about mythology. “His special quality is to make it seem that a magical myth is possible for everyone.” Waterman felt that a good future examination question about the series might ask one to “examine Doctor Who in relation to the idea that ‘it is the object of the myth, as of science, to explain the world, and to make its phenomena intelligible.’”
To fulfil its educational mandate, TVO produced a resource handbook with suggested discussion themes and reading lists. On air, each show was accompanied by a short segment hosted by American futurist Jim Dator. Wearing a “Dr. Dator” T-shirt, he explored topics suggested by the episode, including time paradoxes and the possibility of extraterrestrial evolution (he also delivered a eulogy in honour of the Doctor’s third incarnation). This treatment wasn’t unusual for British imports; Andrea Martin, for example, presented bonus material for the late-1960s ITV First World War drama Tom Grattan’s War.
Judith Merril, "The Undoctor" Doctor Who, 1979
When TVOntario introduced episodes featuring Tom Baker (the fourth Doctor) in 1978, you might say Dator himself regenerated — into science-fiction writer Judith Merril. The namesake of the Toronto Public Library’s speculative-fiction special collection, Merril served as the “Un-Doctor” in 108 segments over the next three years. “I like to take something that was said or happened on the show and add some new information to it or stimulate the audience’s critical centres in some other way,” she told the Toronto Star in 1980. Merril hoped her pieces would encourage viewers to, like the Doctor, think critically and question authority.
One serial Merril found problematic was “The Talons of Weng-Chiang.” While often acclaimed as one of the top stories of the Baker era, the serial — influenced by everything from penny dreadfuls to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion — featured plenty of Victorian-era Asian stereotyping and a lead guest star in yellowface. Chinese Canadian National Council for Equality president Joseph Wong said that the stereotypes ranged “from an evil Fu Manchu character to pigtailed coolies and laundrymen who submissively commit suicide on their master’s orders.” The story was pulled prior to airing in November 1980. A TVOntario official admitted that the move constituted censorship “but in a good cause.” The BBC’s Canadian rep apologized for causing offence but noted that the show had been made for a British audience, who, because of a different mixture of cultures, might not be offended by the same things.
Fourth Doctor intro
While Merril initially enjoyed her segments, changes behind the scenes led to disenchantment. Her final producer wanted to use green screen in the studio instead of location shooting. He also wanted her to wear costumes and tighten her scripts. “We did a few good shows that year, but it was a lot more work,” Merrill later reflected. “I decided I would need to get a hell of a lot more money to keep doing it the way he wanted.”
But budget cuts dictated the end of Merrill’s features. “That was that for my career as a Doctor Who specialist,” she said.
Fans of the original series and its occasional technical shortcomings may be amused by a description of the series that came in response to a reader question in The Canadian newspaper supplement in 1979. “Doctor Who sports the best costumes, design, and sets the BBC and a large budget can provide.” (While it mentioned that the series was often filmed on location, it failed to mention that those locations were frequently quarries.)
Doctor Who creator Sydney Newman discusses his career with the CBC
Another consequence of Doctor Who’s run on TVO: the inadvertent preservation of episodes of the series. Until the late 1970s, the BBC destroyed many of its tapes, and the series was a major casualty (as of this posting, 97 episodes originally aired between 1964 and 1969 are considered missing, though some of those are rumoured to be held by collectors). When TVO returned several Jon Pertwee serials to the BBC in the early 1980s, they served as colour replacements for black-and-white film copies that had been retained.
The series continued to send sensitive viewers diving behind the couch in terror, convince fans to knit long scarves and dress like cricketers, and help the network’s fundraising efforts until broadcast rights moved to YTV in 1989. The show briefly resurfaced on TVO in 1991 and 1992 to use up the remaining repeat rights of the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy stories. Doctor Who disappeared from the station for good following the final part of “Delta and the Bannermen” on July 2, 1992, though one final run of the 14-part “The Trial of a Timelord” ran on then-sister station La Chaine Française (now TFO) until August 30, 1992. La Chaine also ran French dubs of the Baker stories through the summer of 1993.
As for Newman, he left the BBC in 1967; after failing to find success in the British film industry, he returned to Canada. Following a short stint as an adviser to the CRTC, he was appointed NFB chairman in 1970 (he reportedly told filmmakers that their works were boring because they “didn’t love the audience enough”). His five-year term was marked by improved relations with the CBC and clashes with Quebec-based filmmakers. He spent the rest of his life as a consultant in Britain and Canada and received the Order of Canada in 1982.
TVO Doctor Who Pledge Drive with Elwy Yost (1987)
In the mid-’80s, he tried to get a creator credit on Doctor Who episodes; his attempt failed in part because there were concerns acknowledging drama heads for shows they may only have supervised could set a bad precedent. He made various suggestions about how to revamp the series, but most showed that he was out of touch with how the series had evolved — he was interested, for example, in returning it to its early conception as a children’s educational show, failing to realize how much older its audience had become. (He did, however, envision casting a female Doctor in the future.) “With justification, he felt his talent was wasted and his achievement unacknowledged,” Martin Knelman wrote in his Globe and Mail obituary of Newman in 1997. “In the end, he himself had become the protagonist in a drama of the downtrodden. It was a story of paradise lost.”
Sources: Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002); Doctor Who: Origins (BBC website, 2006); Head of Drama by Sydney Newman (Toronto: ECW Press, 2017); the November 28, 1963, October 29, 1964, and November 25, 1997, editions of the Globe and Mail; the April 22, 1962, edition of the Observer; the October 9, 1976, edition of the Ottawa Journal; the March 11, 1961, edition of Star Weekly; the January 23, 1960, September 11, 1976, October 1, 1980, and November 6, 1980, editions of the Toronto Star; and the November 7, 1980, edition of the Toronto Sun.
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