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RealWorld
1963 in

the DWU • production history • vital statistics • releases

Timeline for 1963
20th century | 1960s

• 1960 • 1961 • 1962 • 1964 • 1965 • 1966 • 1967 • 1968 • 1969
WikipediaInfo

1963 was a year in which a number of events important to the production of Doctor Who and its spin-offs occurred.

January

March

May

June

July

August

September

  • 3 September - Title sequence assembled from the pre-existing and newly recorded elements by Richard Barclay at Ealing.[4]
  • 18 September - The incidental music for An Unearthly Child was recorded by Norman Kay at the Camden Theatre. (INFO: An Unearthly Child)
  • 20 September - William Hartnell, Carole Ann Ford, Jacqueline Hill and William Russell all meet together for the first time, for a publicity photo shoot at TV Centre.[4]
  • 21 September - Rehearsals for "An Unearthly Child" began at a Drill Hall on Uxbridge Road.[4]
  • 27 September - The first episode, "An Unearthly Child" is recorded.[4] This version of the first episode was beset by technical problems, and the BBC subsequently rejected it for broadcast, authorising a rare "do-over" for later in the year. The outcome of these filming sessions was later dubbed "the Pilot Episode".[8]

October

  • 4 October - After viewing the pilot episode, Sydney Newman officially rejected the Pilot Episode in a lunch meeting with Verity Lambert and Waris Hussein and authorised a remounting of the episode.[4] According to Howe and Walker, this was a contingency that had been planned for.[3] Over the next couple of weeks, numerous revisions to the script and changes to costuming and characterisation were undertaken.
  • 9-11 October - Filming for "An Unearthly Child" restarted at Ealing Studios following September's false start.
  • 10 October - Donald Wilson wrote an extensive memo to Donald Baverstock, Sydney Newman, Joanna Spicer and Richard Levin. He passionately argued for a higher special effects effort than the SFX department had apparently been prepared to give. He also pushed back against the apparent institutional sloth in deciding whether to go beyond the first four episodes. Wilson argued that the Doctor Who production team needed a longer commitment, due to extraordinary lead time necessary to produce the show.
  • 11 October - Director Christopher Barry outlined his initial thoughts on serial B to script editor David Whitaker. At this stage they thought they were making a story called The Mutants, but posterity would remember the story as The Daleks — the story that turned Doctor Who into "must see TV".
  • 14 October - Rehearsals for the remount of "An Unearthly Child" took place on this Monday. It was followed by three more days of rehearsal, leading up to recording on the evening of Friday 18 October. Though it wasn't the first rehearsal in Doctor Who history — the so-called "pilot episode" had been rehearsed, of course — it was this week-long rehearsal period that set up the basic production pattern which would last for years afterwards.
  • 16 October - Donald Baverstock ordered thirteen episodes of Doctor Who, after being satisfied with the promise of the so-called "pilot episode". At the same time he ordered John Mair to give him hard numbers about the cost of the series' special effects. When those numbers proved shockingly high just a few days later, a mini-crisis briefly threatened to shut down the show.
  • 18 October - Studio recording for the very first Doctor Who episode took place at Lime Grove Studio D.
  • 18 October - Verity Lambert decided that designer Peter Brachacki was unsuitable for Doctor Who, and demanded a replacement. Barry Newbery and Raymond Cusick were considered, and got to work. Newbery's plans, however, were too costly for Donald Baverstock, who sent a memo to Donald Wilson in complaint.
  • 18 October - Director Christopher Barry received the first attempts at the Dalek voices from J. N. Shearme. Two different approaches arrived through Barry's letterbox: one using computer synthesis and the other using a vocoder. Barry indicated he was particularly interested in the vocoder approach, but no final decision was taken on this day.
  • 25 October - Margot Maxine became the first actor to walk off the set of Doctor Who when she refused to have her teeth blackened. An extra, she was to have played one of the cave people in "The Cave of Skulls"
  • 25 October - Christopher Barry replied to J. N. Shearme's 18 October message, informing him that the BBC had decided not to use either of the methods suggested for Dalek voices — vocoder and computer generation — and that most would be done live, in-studio.
  • 28 October - Five days' worth of pre-filming for sequences in "The Daleks" begins. The Dalek props were unavailable, so scenes involving them were delayed until late November.
  • 29 October - John Mair sent a memo to Joanna Spicer, detailing season 1's stories and their costs at the time. Donald Wilson and Verity Lambert met with Spicer, and agreed to go along with the earlier proposition made on 22 October.

November

December

Footnotes

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