WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:06.440 I think that the most obvious meeting point between Doctor Who and HG Wells is the Colin 00:06.440 --> 00:08.640 Baker story, Time Lash. 00:08.640 --> 00:09.640 Hello. 00:09.640 --> 00:15.320 But the idea that HG Wells should have been inspired by Doctor Who is kind of the wrong 00:15.320 --> 00:19.200 way round, because at the very beginning of Doctor Who, in those early 60s stories, we're 00:19.200 --> 00:25.200 looking at a kind of science fiction that's had its roots emerging from the science fiction 00:25.200 --> 00:41.760 that HG Wells was writing in the last few years of the 19th century. 00:41.760 --> 00:47.400 Herbert George Wells was born in September 1866 in Bromley, which is just outside South 00:47.400 --> 00:48.400 East London. 00:48.400 --> 00:53.080 He came from what I suppose you would call a sort of lower middle class background. 00:53.080 --> 00:57.960 His mother was a maidservant and his father, rather oddly, was a professional cricketer. 00:57.960 --> 01:00.400 When he was 14, he was apprenticed to a draper. 01:00.400 --> 01:05.640 And I think standing behind that counter, he must have come to a lot of early conclusions 01:05.640 --> 01:10.360 about the nature of British society, the stratification of British society. 01:10.360 --> 01:16.040 He thought he was going to die while playing football, was grievously injured, and a doctor 01:16.040 --> 01:19.680 kind of told him he probably wouldn't live much past 30. 01:19.680 --> 01:22.080 So he got very, very busy in his 20s. 01:22.080 --> 01:23.440 He published stuff in the Palmyra Gazette. 01:23.440 --> 01:27.200 He was a bit like Dickens in the sense of being a sort of aspiring popular writer, somebody 01:27.200 --> 01:30.560 who was going to write for magazines, somebody who was going to write novels that lots of 01:30.560 --> 01:31.560 people read. 01:31.560 --> 01:35.600 And the time machine is the one that grabs public attention. 01:35.600 --> 01:38.720 And it's the one that takes quite a young man and begins to turn him into a literary 01:38.720 --> 01:40.260 celebrity of the day. 01:40.260 --> 01:46.180 The time machine is about an inventor who creates a machine that transcends time itself. 01:46.180 --> 01:52.800 He throws the levers and time swooshes around him, like a film being speeded up. 01:52.800 --> 01:58.120 This is a book published in 1895 when the Lumiere brothers are holding their first show. 01:58.120 --> 02:00.480 So it's an idea that is sort of in the air. 02:00.480 --> 02:02.400 So he watches history unfold. 02:02.400 --> 02:06.520 He finds himself in a world where the human race is effectively degenerating into two 02:06.520 --> 02:09.720 different species, the Eloi and the Morlocks. 02:09.720 --> 02:11.720 The idea of evolution is very much in the air. 02:11.720 --> 02:16.400 People are asking, well, where will this process take us next, and what Wells visualizes is 02:16.400 --> 02:22.720 a world that has been transformed beyond recognition by the processes of evolution. 02:22.720 --> 02:27.080 Then he goes on into the far future, sees the destruction of the Earth, the last days 02:27.080 --> 02:29.060 of life on this planet. 02:29.060 --> 02:33.400 Then he comes home and he relates the story. 02:33.400 --> 02:35.760 He says, oh, I'm just going to go on one more trip. 02:35.760 --> 02:37.880 This time I'll get some real proof. 02:37.880 --> 02:46.720 And then he disappears, never seen again. 02:46.720 --> 02:51.400 Many Wells stories obviously have had their influence on the arc, but the key one is the 02:51.400 --> 02:52.400 time machine. 02:52.400 --> 02:55.680 And if you go through the arc, I mean, it's just extraordinary. 02:55.680 --> 02:59.880 The traveler, when he first arrives, he sees this figure of the Sphinx in which his time 02:59.880 --> 03:01.840 machine is later hidden. 03:01.840 --> 03:04.280 And he has to break into it to get it out. 03:04.280 --> 03:08.320 Well, obviously, in the arc, when the travelers first arrive, one of the first things they 03:08.320 --> 03:09.840 see is the statue that is being built. 03:09.840 --> 03:13.760 And then when they arrive for the second time, again, it's the first thing they see. 03:13.760 --> 03:17.720 And as in the Wells story, there's something hidden in the statue, which becomes crucial 03:17.720 --> 03:19.280 to the resolution of the plot. 03:19.280 --> 03:26.320 The invisible refusians are, I suppose, a variation upon Griffin, the invisible man 03:26.320 --> 03:28.240 from Wells's story. 03:28.240 --> 03:32.940 Those scenes we see of objects moving around inside what might actually look rather like 03:32.940 --> 03:37.960 a kind of Edwardian drawing room that's been created on the planet Refusis II. 03:37.960 --> 03:41.960 The reversal, first you think the Guardians have the upper hand, and then they're going 03:41.960 --> 03:46.200 to swap places with the Monoids, is the same as what happens when the traveler arrives 03:46.200 --> 03:47.960 in the future in the Wells story. 03:47.960 --> 03:51.880 He thinks the Eloi are the masters, and they're the bosses. 03:51.880 --> 03:54.920 And then he realizes, actually, it's the other way around. 03:54.920 --> 03:58.280 The Guardians and the Monoids don't have the same relationship that the Eloi and the 03:58.280 --> 04:03.280 Morlocks have, because the Eloi and the Morlocks, the Eloi are really the Morlocks' cattle. 04:03.280 --> 04:08.400 And at the beginning of the arc, that's not the relationship between the Guardians and 04:08.400 --> 04:09.680 the Monoids. 04:09.680 --> 04:16.720 What I think perhaps the arc more resembles is Wells's later novel, The Sleeper Awakes. 04:16.720 --> 04:17.720 That's true. 04:17.720 --> 04:23.840 A revolution overthrowing the upper classes who haven't been concentrating properly on 04:23.840 --> 04:26.220 looking after the welfare of the lower classes. 04:26.220 --> 04:30.480 We know that there are only a few million humans in those funny little drawers. 04:30.480 --> 04:32.000 So where did the rest of them go? 04:32.000 --> 04:36.720 Well, this is an idea that Wells was very, very keen on. 04:36.720 --> 04:42.240 A special group of humans who would really rule over the rest of humanity and represent 04:42.240 --> 04:43.600 what was best about them. 04:43.600 --> 04:49.320 It's a slightly sinister idea, but it's one you can read in the arc because of this idea 04:49.320 --> 04:52.960 of them being really the people who look after the human race, the Guardians of the human 04:52.960 --> 04:53.960 race. 04:53.960 --> 04:54.960 There's something separate from the rest of us. 04:54.960 --> 04:57.560 Hey, look at him then. 04:57.560 --> 05:03.040 This game park flying through space is something that Wells writes about in the outline of 05:03.040 --> 05:04.320 history. 05:04.320 --> 05:09.440 And he envisages a time when the massacre of animals is over. 05:09.440 --> 05:16.320 Quite an eccentric idea for a man writing in the first ten years of the 20th century. 05:16.320 --> 05:20.800 Dodo's lethal cold is a nice twist on what happens at the very end of The War of the 05:20.800 --> 05:26.280 Worlds when the Martian invaders are felled by this bacteria from Earth. 05:26.280 --> 05:31.480 I've got to say, at the time the arc went out, probably even I thought, no, this is 05:31.480 --> 05:39.120 from the film The First Men in the Moon, where an Earthling takes a cold to another planet 05:39.120 --> 05:42.720 and all the aliens catch it and civilization is wiped out. 05:42.720 --> 05:48.440 And that's a kind of mutated Wellsian idea that Nigel Neill, who's a very great influence 05:48.440 --> 05:53.240 on Doctor Who, had put into the film script of First Man in the Moon, which came out about 05:53.240 --> 05:55.120 1963. 05:55.120 --> 05:58.920 That's probably where the idea filters into Doctor Who. 05:58.920 --> 06:02.000 Wells is certainly one of the progenitors of British science fiction. 06:02.000 --> 06:04.440 I mean, I think Wells is the father of science fiction. 06:04.440 --> 06:07.520 I think he has a far greater claim than, say, Jules Verne has. 06:07.520 --> 06:12.040 Jules Verne was the science fiction default guy before Wells. 06:12.040 --> 06:17.920 When Wells sent his astronauts to the moon in a diving bell covered in anti-gravity paint, 06:17.920 --> 06:21.560 Jules Verne said, well, I sent my astronauts to the moon with gunpowder. 06:21.560 --> 06:23.360 Yeah, here is my gunpowder. 06:23.360 --> 06:26.320 Yeah, where is Monsieur Wells's cavarade? 06:26.320 --> 06:28.840 And Wells sort of shrugged and said, it's a story. 06:28.840 --> 06:35.600 He's a master of blending the everyday and the unusual. 06:35.600 --> 06:41.280 So you know, in the War of the Worlds, Martian invaders in kind of suburban southeastern 06:41.280 --> 06:44.600 England, that's something that Doctor Who does, obviously, brilliantly. 06:44.600 --> 06:47.920 And that's a very British contribution, I think, to science fiction. 06:47.920 --> 06:52.400 I think it's something we do particularly well to sort of ground the sensational in 06:52.400 --> 06:53.400 the mundane. 06:53.400 --> 06:57.120 And I think so much of that goes back to HG Wells. 06:57.120 --> 07:03.200 What Wells does is take these ideas and put them into a form of fiction that is just very, 07:03.200 --> 07:10.240 very popular and very, very widely read and has all of the attractions of late Victorian 07:10.240 --> 07:11.240 narrative fiction. 07:11.240 --> 07:15.280 Other people have tried to speculate about the future of humanity. 07:15.280 --> 07:19.480 But it's rather more like a kind of treatise than it is a thumping good story. 07:19.480 --> 07:24.680 And that's what you've got with Wells, a man who understands the dynamics of popular fiction 07:24.680 --> 07:30.280 and also can bring to it these incredibly sophisticated and forward-looking ideas. 07:30.280 --> 07:35.240 War of the Worlds, Time Machine, Invisible Man, Doctor Moreau, they have enough content 07:35.240 --> 07:36.240 for anybody. 07:36.240 --> 07:39.620 I mean, they're really serious books with big ideas. 07:39.620 --> 07:41.400 But they're also just ripping yarns. 07:41.400 --> 07:46.160 They have that ancient mariner grab you by the lapel and force you to listen to this 07:46.160 --> 07:47.160 story. 07:47.160 --> 07:52.560 It's clear that this kind of frame, this kind of thought experiment, gave Wells the ability 07:52.560 --> 08:00.000 to talk about ideas about society and ideas about evolution in ways that one just couldn't 08:00.000 --> 08:03.960 in a memetic novel depicting 1890s London. 08:03.960 --> 08:08.960 A really good example of this is The World Set Free, which is the one that features atomic 08:08.960 --> 08:10.520 warfare. 08:10.520 --> 08:18.880 Wells read a very abstruse scientific paper on the decay of radium particles and instantly 08:18.880 --> 08:21.240 made a connection atomic bomb. 08:21.240 --> 08:22.240 Science. 08:22.240 --> 08:27.800 But once he had done that, he also came up with the story. 08:27.800 --> 08:29.480 Fiction. 08:29.480 --> 08:33.520 Like all forms of fiction, science fiction is a literature of story. 08:33.520 --> 08:39.040 And idea and story are very different things, thinking, oh, we might be invaded by creatures 08:39.040 --> 08:40.440 from another world. 08:40.440 --> 08:41.440 That's an idea. 08:41.440 --> 08:43.440 War of the Worlds is a story. 08:43.440 --> 08:49.600 The documents upon which Doctor Who was founded show that the people who were working in that 08:49.600 --> 08:54.080 pre-production period were researching contemporary science fiction very, very deeply. 08:54.080 --> 08:55.900 They were reading Brian Aldiss. 08:55.900 --> 09:00.840 They were going to have lunch with Brian Aldiss in Oxford and talk about what's great in contemporary 09:00.840 --> 09:01.840 British science fiction. 09:01.840 --> 09:05.160 Brian Aldiss was a leading figure in British science fiction. 09:05.160 --> 09:09.640 He was at the time the secretary of the British Science Fiction Association. 09:09.640 --> 09:13.480 I think it's extraordinary that so little of that fed through. 09:13.480 --> 09:19.660 I think Doctor Who does draw much more on film and TV, maybe even draws on radio to 09:19.660 --> 09:22.160 some extent, as its precedence. 09:22.160 --> 09:26.320 And this is partly because it's made by film and TV people. 09:26.320 --> 09:30.560 And film and TV people, you know, they look to film and TV rather than necessarily reading 09:30.560 --> 09:31.560 the books. 09:31.560 --> 09:35.960 Obviously, you can't talk about where Doctor Who comes from without talking about Quatermass. 09:35.960 --> 09:42.120 Science fiction, when it was scary, was something that got people hooked. 09:42.120 --> 09:48.080 And that even with the very limited resources of technology and visual effects, you could 09:48.080 --> 09:53.800 put something on screen whose strangeness was shocking. 09:53.800 --> 10:00.880 That's the one thing when you watch 1960s Doctor Who, the idea of how utterly unlike 10:00.880 --> 10:03.240 anything else on television this was. 10:03.240 --> 10:09.320 It's surprising how long it takes for Quatermass to exert an influence upon Doctor Who. 10:09.320 --> 10:14.000 It doesn't really start, I don't think, until Patrick Troughton turns up. 10:14.000 --> 10:20.040 And I think that's because Doctor Who more or less has its roots in the 19th century. 10:20.040 --> 10:22.800 It's sort of HG Wells meets Conan Doyle. 10:22.800 --> 10:28.260 The fact that we don't know what the Doctor's name is, is an inheritance from the time machine. 10:28.260 --> 10:30.520 We don't know what the time traveller's name is. 10:30.520 --> 10:34.280 The reason Doctor Who has survived isn't just because it's a great concept, it's because 10:34.280 --> 10:36.440 it's a great character. 10:36.440 --> 10:41.080 And that's the one thing they couldn't get by talking to loads of science fiction writers. 10:41.080 --> 10:44.200 I mean, I think over the years, Doctor Who has occasionally done this, has tried to get 10:44.200 --> 10:48.120 lots of science fiction people in and thrown the ideas about. 10:48.120 --> 10:53.480 But it still, particularly in the new series, it comes down over and over again to character, 10:53.480 --> 10:55.520 how we feel about these people. 10:55.520 --> 11:01.680 Doctor Who is a sort of popular adventure programme with elements of sci-fi, with a 11:01.680 --> 11:05.640 massive dose of horror, with elements of fantasy and whatnot. 11:05.640 --> 11:07.800 But I don't think it's primarily science fiction. 11:07.800 --> 11:10.600 Doctor Who hooked us into science fiction. 11:10.600 --> 11:13.480 From there we went to read other science fiction. 11:13.480 --> 11:16.080 Has Doctor Who been a good thing for science fiction in general? 11:16.080 --> 11:17.760 Yes, I think it has. 11:17.760 --> 11:21.600 But really Doctor Who is melodrama. 11:21.600 --> 11:24.680 It's not science fiction, I don't think, quite. 11:24.680 --> 11:27.080 Science is all nonsense, isn't it? 11:27.080 --> 11:29.080 And, you know, who cares? 11:29.080 --> 11:31.080 That's true. 11:31.080 --> 11:33.600 True. 11:33.600 --> 11:37.520 I think Wells would have thought Doctor Who wasn't quite taking things seriously enough, 11:37.520 --> 11:38.520 really. 11:38.520 --> 11:39.520 Didn't have enough despair in it. 11:39.520 --> 11:45.280 I mean, when you think about what Wells was like at the end of his life, writing his essay, 11:45.280 --> 11:48.600 Mind at the End of Its Tether, predicting nothing really but doom. 11:48.600 --> 11:51.840 Towards the end of his life, Wells hated his own earlier books as well. 11:51.840 --> 11:55.600 I mean, he always resented when people came up to him and said, I really love The Time 11:55.600 --> 11:56.600 Machine. 11:56.600 --> 12:02.520 He said, no, no, no, haven't you read my 18-volume history? 12:02.520 --> 12:04.880 Wells is a very ambiguous figure. 12:04.880 --> 12:09.120 He's ambiguous about his own writings, he's ambiguous about his politics, his socialism, 12:09.120 --> 12:11.280 about Britain, all sorts of things. 12:11.280 --> 12:14.080 I think he would have had a sort of conflicted view of Doctor Who. 12:14.080 --> 12:17.800 He would have seen the possibilities of a vehicle to bring his interest in science and 12:17.800 --> 12:23.560 to bring his interest and ideas to a wider public. 12:23.560 --> 12:27.880 But I think he would also have been, he would have seen it possibly as a, you know, that 12:27.880 --> 12:31.120 very populism would be something that he would also despise. 12:31.120 --> 12:38.480 Although in its early years, it seems absolutely loyal to many of the founding interests of 12:38.480 --> 12:39.480 his fiction. 12:39.480 --> 12:43.840 So I think he would have seen worlds that he recognised, but I think he would have liked 12:43.840 --> 12:45.880 everybody in them to just stop being silly. 12:45.880 --> 12:48.880 Oh no, don't worry about me, Doctor. 12:48.880 --> 13:13.000 I'm not.