Funny thing: the BBC have often been very sniffy about Doctor Who.
Something that comes across very strongly in Pull to Open is that this nasal congestion goes way, way back: right back to the programme’s origins. The BBC just didn’t get it. What was the point, they huffed and puffed, of wasting the resources of the mighty corporation on a silly children’s science fiction series, which would only appeal to adolescents of exceedingly low intelligence, would require scenery shifters to store a bulky spaceship set (yes, really: there were memos grumbling about this), would cost a lot of money making things for it, and whose producer was a) young and b) female?
Oh, all right. You can make the first story. Well, you can have 13 episodes. Make it 26. But after that, we’ll get rid of it and stick a dull and worthy kiddy drama series in its place. No one’s going to want to watch it anyway. But don’t expect a Radio Times cover. That’s reserved for yet another run of a radio comedy that I like. Television is only radio with pictures anyway. It is an inferior medium favoured by the lower social classes. And the fellow who came up with the idea is from the colonies, dammit! He’s not even an Englishman! My Papa shot grouse with Lord Reith, I’ll have you know. (Turns on the Home Service on the wireless and pours another brandy while lighting his pipe. Collapses into armchair in a huff. What is the BBC coming to?)
Listening to the audiobook of Pull to Open — The Inside Story of How the BBC Created and Launched Doctor Who, it’s amazing Doctor Who ever got made at all. They even complained that the TARDIS set was far too expensive – overlooking the fact that the cost was intended to be amortised over the entire first season. Extraordinary.
So, thank goodness for Donald Wilson, who blasted out a barrage of angry memos (they’re all reproduced here), telling his senior colleagues that they were talking, to use a contemporary idiom, utter balderdash. ‘We have an absolute knockout in this show,’ he thundered. So shut up and have a bit of faith.
The origins of Doctor Who have been extensively explored in the scholarly literature; Pull to Open brings everything together and gives a great deal more detail, too. Paul Hayes really has done his research; it’s very hard to find anything new to say about all this but he pulls it off commendably.

The standard view is that Who sprang from the fertile imagination of Sydney Newman; Hayes stresses that, while Newman’s role was crucial, the concept’s origins are much better understood as a team effort by a number of people. Donald Wilson was arguably almost as important in the genesis of Who as Newman was; Hayes even tracks down Malcolm Hulke’s notes of telephone conversations with Newman and Wilson from Hulke’s research for his 1972 book, The Making of Doctor Who (co-written with one Terrance Dicks). We’re given a huge amount of detail about the meetings of the programme’s steering committee as the concept took shape: who was there, who said what, and (my extrapolation) why it was a very good thing that Bunny Webber didn’t get anything past the committee, because he had some really dumb ideas. Cliff, Lola, Biddy, and a doddering alien nutcase called Dr Who morphed into Ian, Barbara, Susan, and the Doctor. An invisible bubble morphed into a police box. Dr Who stopped being a paranoid, insane, homesick, walking cliché, and became an amoral explorer and academic. And the rest, as they say, is history.
There’s a great deal of biographical information about the key people, which will come as new to almost all of us. Peter Brachacki and Donald Wilson both experienced the horrors of the concentration camps: Brachacki as an inmate, Wilson as one of the liberators. (The distance from the end of the Second World War to The Daleks is the same as the distance from now to Charles Kennedy’s last days as leader of the Lib Dems in 2006. So, when you had metal aliens enthusiastically advocating extermination as the way to deal with their enemies, it had a revolting and horrific resonance which is totally lost today.)
The audiobook’s read by Christopher Naylor, who’s the new Harry Sullivan for Big Finish. This is, though, Chris reading as Chris, not as Harry – and, of course, he’s great. His evident enthusiasm for the subject matter grabs and retains your attention. Oh, and he does a mean Sydney Newman impression, too. Chris was a guest a couple of years ago at Bedford Who Charity Con, when he came along with Sadie Miller. He is, unsurprisingly, one of the nicest people you could hope to meet.
Verdict? Excellent book; it’s unlikely that anything as good as this on the origins of Doctor Who will ever be published in the future. Quite possibly the last word on the subject. Excellent reading by Chris, too.