The original article appeared on RadioTimes.com in 2013.

A surprisingly rare artifact has surfaced in the collection of director Waris Hussein – his original studio plan, personally annotated for the Doctor Who pilot episode of 1963. The document is dated “9/25” – September 25, date ‘today 50 years ago.

This week, five decades ago, the cast and crew of Doctor Who were busy preparing for Episode 1, A Supernatural Child, which would be recorded on Friday, September 27. While the actors rehearsed in the less-than-glamorous Drill Hall of Uxbridge Road, London W12, the BBC’s design team and set builders built the sets to this plan at nearby Lime Grove Studios.

The episode was written to be recorded “live”, with only one interruption in the recording. “Back then,” says Waris, “we were shooting continuously on four cameras with very few interruptions in the tape. You had to know exactly what you were doing. It was almost mathematical in his strategy.

By studying the Waris diagram (above), we can see how the action was captured on four color-coded cameras and how the sets made maximum use of the allowed floor space, built up to its perimeter.

It also reveals the layout of the sets within the confines of Studio D: how the entire junkyard (top left) faced the Coal Hill School classrooms (bottom left), while the Totter’s Lane ‘outer’ ensemble (top right) ran alongside the TARDIS gates (bottom right).

We have broken down the floor plan into individual sets …

Totter’s Lane

This section shows the length of Totter’s Lane leading to the junkyard gates (far left) along which a policeman walks in the fog at the start of the episode. Teachers Ian and Barbara will also park here later.

Along the upper perimeter is a backdrop indicated by a ’20’ SEB [photographic blow-up] in a photo frame ”. Below are the outlines of the buildings and an instruction to “paint the ground as a pavement and sidewalk”.

The colored disks indicate the positions of camera 3 (green) and camera 4 (yellow). The blue square (left) is the microphone boom.

Note that the yellow camera disk 4 is positioned here above the “floating screen with doors” of the Tardis control room assembly. So, presumably, this screen could be pushed aside to access the camera.

Coal Hill School

Along the perimeter of the studio is a school hallway leading to Barbara’s classroom and Ian’s lab. On screen, the illusion is created that they are separate pieces, but are actually two halves of a whole, with camera 2 (blue) pointing in different directions.

The sets are furnished with desks and Ian’s lab counter.

Junkyard

All the scenes of the heist take place at night, so the surrounding background is a black velvet sheet.

Towards the rear, a ladder leads to a raised platform. To the right is the door that opens of its own accord at the start of the episode. And most importantly, in a prominent position, is the mysterious police box.

You locate the positions of the microphone and the color-coded camera. Also note that the control room (that is to say the production gallery of director Waris Hussein, producer Verity Lambert and the team) overlooks this set.

Tardis

And here it is – the Tardis control room! In all its glory (overhead). (NB We have rotated this image to improve readability.)

The outline of the original control room exactly follows the outline and a strange crease in the perimeter of the studio. The “walls” include a 40 foot artist’s cloth at the back, a 28 foot long section of enlarged photo of circular “indentations” and, lower down, a 12 foot 4 floating screen on casters and of course the door section, which proved problematic during pilot check-in, as the doors refused to close.

The rear of the set features an intricate structure containing the raised scanner screen, plexiglass panels, and what would later be identified as the fault locator. There is also a curious mirrored column.

The hexagonal central control panel is surrounded by aluminum floor sections, along with a “+ 10ft hanging canopy”. This piece was so heavy that it will feature in a few later episodes. (For November’s BBC2 drama, An Adventure in Space and Time, which painstakingly recreates this set of Tardis, Mark Gatiss told me that the canopy would be rendered via CGI.)

The four cameras (color coded by Waris) peeked through the unbuilt section of the set – aka “the fourth wall” – set for the long scene that picks up on the second half. by An Unearthly Child.

*

As many Doctor Who fans know, the Pilot episode, when completed, was rated unsatisfactory. The script was revised and An Unearthly Child was recorded again, put together on this same floor plan, on Friday October 18, 1963.

Many thanks to Waris Hussein for his help with this feature.

Waris annotated scripts for The Cave of Skulls

Read all about A Supernatural Child in our Doctor Who History Guide.

Both versions of An Unearthly Child are available in the BBC’s DVD set, Doctor Who: the Beginning.

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