AN OR AL HISTORY OF DOCTOR WHO’S TITLE SEQU ENCES ACROSS ITS ORIGINAL RUN
DOCTOR WHO’S FIRST title sequence predated any conception of a mysterious time traveller and a telephone box. In 1960, Norman Taylor was working as an Operations Manager at the BBC’s Lime Grove studios.
Norman Taylor: “Sometimes we were allocated to two minor programmes in the same studio on the same day. This often resulted in a gap of activity between the transmission of the first and the start of rehearsals of the second.
On one of these days, I used the gap to experiment with a camera looking at a monitor displaying its own picture. I got the usual effect of diminishing images of the monitor disappearing into limbo, when suddenly some stray light hit the screen and the whole picture went mobile with swirling patterns of black and white. Later I repeated the experiment but fed a black and white caption mixed with the camera output to the monitor, and very soon got the ‘Doctor Who effect’”.
Taylor reported this finding – logged as a “Technical Suggestion” – to Ben Palmer, the BBC’s Investigations Engineer at the time.
Ben Palmer: “I conducted several tests and discovered an astonishing range of feedback effects which were visually stunning. By deliberately moving the camera slightly and changing the operation of the camera tube – reversing line scan, reversing field scan, rotating the picture, phase-reversing the signal - one achieved multiple patterns, all quite abstract in nature.”
Palmer spoke to the BBC’s Presentation department, and suggested the effect – called howlround – might be used to generate an image during one of their broadcasting intervals. But the idea was turned down. It did, however, make it onto the screen, airing over the opening and into the closing titles of a specially commissioned TV opera, Tobias And The Angel. That one-off was broadcast on 16 May 1960, and directed by Rudolph Cartier – famous for his collaboration with Nigel Kneale on the Quatermass series.
In the summer of 1963, pre-production was underway on a new teatime serial for BBC Television starring William Hartnell. John Griffiths, a film editor at Ealing Studios, was visited by the show’s producer, Verity Lambert, and first director, Waris Hussein.
John Griffiths: “They said, ‘We’re going to produce a new series of programmes, and they’re called Doctor Who.’ I said, ‘Oh no, you mean Dr No, don’t you?’ They said, ‘No, no, no – you’ll be talking about Doctor Who long after you’ve forgotten about Dr No!’ They handed me a can [containing the howlround footage shot by Palmer for Tobias] and said, ‘This is the opening title in here. We want you to cut it’. I looked at the film and it was actually a television camera looking at its own monitor. I just cut it together, and that was t
