I recall the rebels on Dalek controlled earth asking Barbara if she could cook - but that’s not an unreasonable question for a group of male soldiers to ask a middle-aged lady. All the original Doctors were somewhat patronising to their companions. I struggle to think of examples of the First Doctor being particularly sexist. So although it's a myth, it’s a myth that stands in for a truth. But he did use a lot of pseudo-science and Jon Pertwee did tell a story about memorizing that particular phrase to the tune of "When I was a lad." from H.M.S Pinafore. Everyone knows that the Third Doctor used to say “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” a lot, even though in the actual scripts, he didn’t. There is such a thing as fan lore and folk memory. What I am confident that the First Doctor would not have done under those circumstances is threaten to spank a 28 year old stranger. To which Ian would have replied "Oh Doctor! If you had taught in a London secondary modern school, you would know that it is sometimes politic to go unaccountably deaf for a few seconds…"Īnd the Doctor would have gone "Hmm, hmm" and everyone would have laughed. But I imagine he would have said something like “Goodness gracious me! You will make me blush! I haven’t heard such words since I was on the lower decks of HMS Victory!” Mrs Whitehouse thought that even “bum” was crossing a line. In one sense it's a meaningless question: no-one could possibly have said “bloody” or “arse” on 1960s TV. It is impossible to know how the First Doctor would have reacted to swearing. But “How the Doctor came to see that Susan was no longer a little girl” is one of the things Dalek Invasion of Earth was about. You may think that shutting her out of the TARDIS at the end of the story is just as abusive as threatening to hit her at the beginning. But at the end of the story, he treats her like an adult, even though she is only seventeen. So at the beginning of the story, he treats Susan as if she is about twelve, even though she is seventeen. He mixes up his companion's names and can’t remember how to operate the TARDIS. The original series pitch used the word “senile”. Young people today may feel that it is not quite politically correct, or even decent, for stories to have overall narrative structures and for scenes to have points, but in those days everyone thought it was perfectly normal. The scene had a purpose within the overall structure of Dalek Invasion of Earth. This was the kind of thing embarrassing Dads said in those days. When he gets cross with her, he talks like a tetchy, old-fashioned, embarrassing, late-1950s Dad. But the Doctor is more or less Susan’s father. (All the bad lines in 60s Who were unscripted ad libs by William Hartnell, in the same way that all the bad lines in Shakespeare are interpolations by Middleton.) And it would have been better if Terry Nation had written “clip round the ear” or “thump” rather than “jolly good smacked bottom”. We would like to believe that the remark was an unscripted interjection by William Hartnell. You can see why the old boy might be a bit miffed, but we cringe when he threatens to spank her. In the first episode of Dalek Invasion Earth she recklessly causes a bridge to collapse, blocking off the only route back to the TARDIS. Canon be damned, the First Doctor is Susan’s grandfather: he has been in loco parentis for a number of years. In the 1950s, most children got smacked by their parents.
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