Last year, I hit one of those little tiny trivial facts which had vast implications for the way I perceive Doctor Who...
Jon Pertwee's TARDIS sets had no interior door.
*pauses for a dramatic chord which completely fails to arrive*
Okay, why does this matter in the slightest? Well...
think of your mental image of the TARDIS. It's vast, innit? Packed with stuff, and miles upon miles of corridors. We take it for granted that the ship is ludicrously huge. In fact, one of the recurring complaints about the new show in its first few years was that it almost never showed us anything beyond the console room -- you got the occasional line about stuff down the halls, but we never even saw the door leading off from the console room. To a generation of fanboys raised on stories like The Invasion of Time or Logopolis, that was a clear sign that They're Doing It Wrong... even a brief glimpse of a wardrobe room or a couple lines directing Rose through the corridors were a pale shadow of the original show.
But then you look at what the old show actually did... and you realize just how much of it doesn't match that mental image at all. When you look, you realize Pertwee's time is only part of it. Basically, anyone who started watching the show any time between "The Invasion" (late 1968) and "Terror of the Zygons" (late 1975) -- and there were a lot of us, that's a longer run than the entire new show to date -- would have been given no clue at all that the TARDIS was any bigger than a single room. Not a single line directing someone just-down-the-hall-five-millionth-door-on-the-left. Not even a sign that there was an interior door. For all that whole generation of fans knew, the TARDIS was just a room.
Sure, there had been signs before then -- maybe half a dozen episodes across five years -- where we saw other rooms in the Ship. But even then there was no clue that the TARDIS was any bigger than, well, a ship. The first moment where they establish the TARDIS is spectacularly big, even whimsically big, is the opening of "The Masque of Mandragora"... in season fourteen. When the old show was half over.
And then abruptly the show does a bit-flip. Suddenly starting in season fifteen, from a show which only occasionally even showed the TARDIS console room on special occasions, suddenly it was in about half the episodes each year... now we get companions' rooms, and standing corridor sets, and running jokes about how vast it is. (There are practical reasons for all this, BTW, to do with the change in production methods. When they were shooting one episode a week in a tiny studio, there was a strong pressure not to use the TARDIS set at all in an episode unless absolutely necessary; when they moved to shooting a whole four-parter together, you could splice TARDIS scenes into any episode at no extra cost.) Anyway, from about 1978-85, suddenly Doctor Who was doing the exact opposite of what it had previously done.
And that's the generation when the Doctor Who Programme Guides were written. When fandom really started to emerge. And that's where conventional wisdom came from.
But the question I want to ask is, why didn't we ever notice how much of Doctor Who was so far from our mental picture of it?
I'm not just talking about the TARDIS, but about a lot of the other things we fans take for granted. Doctor Who as this constantly universe-spanning show packed with alien planets? Actually, the first half of the show is majority Earth-based, whether through historicals or UNIT or Troughton's bases-under-siege. Again, it's only from about 1978-1986 -- the same stretch as the TARDIS-filled one -- where alien planets predominate, and then in the last couple of years they move back to Earth. (And do less on the TARDIS sets too.) Or how about something as basic as the format of the show being built around the Doctor and his girl companion? We don't actually get that as the norm until about 1976 -- until then, as a rule there's consistently a second male regular around, from Ian to Jamie to the Brigadier to Harry.
Basically, whatever rule you set up for the format of the old show, you can find a stretch of time where exceptions to that rule dominate. But why doesn't this leap out at us?
I really think this is down to something fundamental about the fannish mind. By our nature, we are brilliant at recognizing patterns, and linking them up -- point to a bit of Doctor characterization in an episode from 1988, we can point to precedents in 1967 or 1978 or whenever (which probably never actually crossed the minds of the writers). And in the case of most Doctor Who fans, we were handed a lot of the patterns on a platter... rather than discovering the whole show as it went along in order, most of us encountered an initial batch of episodes, and then discovered the overall rules and history from a Programme Guide which presented the whole series in one homogenous lump. Give us that kind of perspective, we can see how anything connects to anything.
But once we've locked onto a pattern, it becomes harder to focus on the isolated data points which go outside it. They look tiny by comparison, negligible. And so we're less likely to add them up and realize just how many they are, and what other patterns they form.
Even those of us who were lucky enough to immediately follow the Programme Guide with seeing the entire old show in one straight-through run on PBS -- in my case, in 1986-87 -- got vast stretches of time telescoped down; what we're presented with is a sort of sum, or mathematical average, of the whole of Doctor Who, rather than a long-term progression. It's a lot harder to notice how long it's been between sightings of the rest of the TARDIS when you're talking seven months rather than six years. Long-term changes look like brief diversions. You don't realize just how much the show is evolving -- departing from what we've already decided are its norms.
And that's why the lack of a TARDIS interior door is so striking. Because for all the decades since then, every time we watched "The War Games" or "Colony In Space" or "Planet of the Daleks" or whatever... we just sort of mentally filled it in.
It's something to remember, when we're making grand pronouncements based on our fannish knowledge about what Doctor Who should be like... that some bits of what it's been like, we're predisposed not to see. Basically, it's worth remembering that whatever we think of Doctor Who as being, you can probably find a vast stretch of it which is more like the exact opposite.