Monday 23 November 2009

Early Radio Times - Hartnell

I´ve been looking back at the early Radio Times issues, and the Cutting Archive has what looks like a complete library of scans for the first Doctor. Every episode has a programme listing (obviously, its the point of the magazine, but they are all on the site to see!), containing cast and crew information, if not much else.

However every new story has a small photo and article introducing it, and at the end of almost every story there´s a teaser for the following week - usually a photo and one line caption. The photos are black and white, often of the Doctor (from the same publicity shoot!), but as the show established itself photos specific to the story were used more often, and I don´t think they´ve been used much since - I wonder if the beeb still has all these tucked away somewhere in its collection. And there´s also a couple of cool Dalek illustrations, which I think are worth showing.


The above illustration, from RT cover date 19 December 1964, accompanied ´The Dalek Invaision of Earth´. No artist is credited.

What I hadn´t realised before is that the RT issues varied from region to region, and only some issues have the photos and story intros, so if you are looking to collect these check your research first before you go buying. Generally speaking it looks that as BBC2 spread across the country (it was introduced region by region) it squeezed out the additional Who content. So in many cases the Who bits are only in the Scottish or Northern Ireland issues...


This one (credited ´CWB´) is from RT cover date 29 October 1966, and accompanied the last episode of ´The Tenth Planet´. It actually looks like the same illustration as above, but just inversed and duplicated, but it shows how Patrick Troughton´s arrival relied on heavy promotion by the already popular Daleks... he´s not even mentioned!

I should also highlight the nice graphic which accompanied ´The War Machines´, but which I´m not putting here... I´ll leave that for you to discover!

Scans shown here are from the Cuttings Archive.

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