Who Is The Doctor?

Thursday 21 November 10.00-11.30pm BBC RADIO 2

On Saturday 23 November 23 1963, BBC TV broadcast the very first episode of Doctor Who. Fifty years later, the series is the most successful drama on television. In this special documentary, Radio 2 examines the reasons for its longevity and popularity.

Featuring new interviews with the cast and crew of the series, the programme looks at the lasting appeal of Doctor Who and asks how much of its continued success can be attributed to its basic formula.

With archive clips and the music of Doctor Who composer Murray Gold, Who Is The Doctor? considers the character of the Time Lord across all of his regenerations and revisits the origins of the series with Waris Hussein, director of the debut Doctor Who story, An Unearthly Child.

The programme also examines how the franchise survived when the show was off TV, considers the impact of the revival in 2005 and assesses the value of the series to the BBC.

Presenter/ Russell Tovey, Producer/ Malcolm Prince for the BBC

With a special emphasis on the atmospheric 1960s, tonight’s reading from Audio Go is based on the original TV serial from 1963.

Nuclear threat looms large in this evocative tale, no more so than in the radiation-ravaged world of Skaro. It’s there the TARDIS heads for the Doctor’s fateful first meeting…

Tom and Jerry, Lex Luthor and Superman, Seinfeld and Newman… all great feuds start somewhere. So it is for the Doctor and the bane of all his travels, the Daleks. How did their paths first cross? Were the Daleks always ruthless and evil? How did they come into being?

All of these questions are answered in the very first adventure involving the metal-plated meanies. Not only that, but it’s told in the first person by one of the very first companions, Ian Chesterton (as played by William Russell).

Expect a very different slant on how the Doctor and Ian met, too, involving Barnes Common and everlasting matches.

Doctor Who At 50: Protect And Survive

Sunday 17 November 6.00-6.45pm BBC RADIO 4 EXTRA

It is 50 years since the very first broadcast of long-running science-fiction hit Doctor Who. Radio 4 Extra joins in the celebrations with the chance to hear a whole adventure in one go every night this week.

Peter Davison is the Doctor in this brand-new four-part drama.

The Doctor has been with us for five decades or so – but what about the decade which inspired him – the Sixties? Radio 4 Extra is doing some time travel of its own to evoke that fondly remembered period, and what better way than the Common Men?

The Doctor’s young companion Nyssa is unfamiliar with Earth’s musical heritage – so a trip to the formative days of the Fab Four is in order, to show her what all the fuss is all about.

But the Beatles are nowhere to be seen – instead their role in history has been taken by the Common Men, a trio whose rise to fame isn’t as wholesome as it first appears.

Peter Davison – known and loved for roles in At Home With the Braithwaites, All Creatures Great And Small and A Very Peculiar Practice – takes control of the TARDIS in this tale of thwarted history.

Also in the cast is Radio 4 stalwart Mitch Benn, known for his work on the Now Show and as Zaphod in the Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy stage show, currently on tour.

Late 1963 saw a number of dramatic events – the death of CS Lewis, the assassination of John F Kennedy – and Kenyan independence in December 1963.

The Doctor arrives in a remote homestead during this bloody period of history where he is reunited with an old acquaintance, an ex-Nazi called Klein. Of course it wouldn’t be Doctor Who without some alien threat, and it comes in the form of an avian group intelligence.

But by employing a strategy of divide and conquer, is the Doctor as bad as those he opposes? Sylvester McCoy once more plays the Time Lord in this full cast audio drama.

This unproduced television script is brought to mesmeric life through a combination of performance and narration.

Time travel is an odd business – it’s not just about the history you know, it’s the history you don’t.

Hardcore Doctor Who fans can tell you when and where the Time Lord has been to on television. What about the adventures we didn’t see? What about the time the TARDIS landed in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the crew met Alexander the Great?

Find out as the original team – Ian, Barbara, Susan and the first ever Doctor step out from the time machine into one of the Ancient Wonders of the World, in the year 323 BC. Hear the wit and guile of the very first Doctor Who in action as he thinks his way out of a walk on hot coals – and offers Alexander the Great a way to cheat death through 20th-century means… an iron lung!

Featuring stars of the original series Carol Ann Ford and William Russell.

Doctor Who At 50: Human Resources

Thursday 21 November 6.00-6.45pm BBC RADIO 4 EXTRA

It’s 50 years since the very first broadcast of long-running science-fiction hit Doctor Who. Radio 4 Extra joins in the celebrations with the chance to hear a whole adventure in one go every night this week.