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Alright so here’s the situation: An Unearthly Child was written by Anthony Coburn, who helped in creating Doctor Who alongside Sydney Newman, Verity Lambert, C E Weber, Donald Wilson, and David Whittaker. He died in 1977, with his son Stef then inherited his estate after his mother’s passing in 2013.
Back in 2013 Stef tried to sue the BBC claiming that his father created the idea for the TARDIS and therefore deserved royalties for all of its uses. This was obviously thrown out by the BBC since the TARDIS was made by Verity Lambert, with Coburn only coming up with the police box exterior, which the BBC had earlier settled that they fully owned the design for in an early 2000s court case with the metropolitan police department.
That same year an audiobook reading of the Target Novelization of “An Unearthly Child” was to be released by AudioGO, but then the company fell through and the release was stalled till February 2015. The audiobook was however never released as Stef disputed the rights for its release and the audiobook currently being stuck in purgatory.
Now in 2023 he is using his ownership of the estate to pull “An Unearthly Child” from circulation due to him being mad at the casting of a gay black actor in the title role and demanding a massive settlement payment to give the rights back. These claims are currently being disputed by the BBC as Anthony was working directly for the BBC during the series creation as a staff writer and wasn’t a contracted hire like Terry Nation was when he made the Daleks. Since the Daleks were made for a contracted script, this is how the Daleks and Brigadier are controlled by the Terry Nation and Haisman Estate, but the Master or the Time Lords are controlled by the BBC since they were an internal creation.
If you’re wondering why Stef did these two actions it is purely because he’s greedy and hopes to scare the BBC into giving into his demands and has only made these ownership claims during the anniversary years in a sad attempt at drumming up as much press around it, which he is succeeding at. This habit can be seen by the fact that he recently put a DVD of the episode up for sale on eBay for £500 starting auction before taking it down after people found out it was him.
If you don’t hate the man already. He’s extremely racist, homophobic, transphobic, and a massive anti-vaxxer. When I first clicked on his Twitter, the first tweet I saw was him saying how his estranged sister told him his son died and his response was that vaccines killed him.
Currently the BBC is playing it safe by privating all clips of “An Unearthly Child” and there will probably be some legal action soon to resolve this issue and there’s a fairly good chance the courts will side with the BBC.
Will be interesting to see whether the newly announced BBC streaming of all of Doctor Who will have An Unearthly Child on it. Would be wild if not.
A spokesperson for the BBC said: "This massive iPlayer back catalogue will be home to over 800 hours of Doctor Who content, making it the biggest ever collection of Doctor Who programming in one place but will not include the first four episodes as we do not have all the rights to those."
In lighter news, I watched The Rescue over the weekend and enjoyed it! Vicki seems a bit unstable at times (wanting desperately to be rescued but then getting furious with the TARDIS team for showing up and "ruining everything" when they haven't interfered with her rescue in any way) but I'll chalk that up to the stress of being stranded for who knows how long and having the deal with the deaths of the rest of the crew.
What really struck me was the Doctor's showdown with Koquillion. Maybe this is just my bad memory or the gaps in my First Doctor knowledge at work, but this is the first time I can remember Hartnell being completely in control at the climax of the story, having figured out what's going on all by himself and confronting the villain alone. It's very impressive and a sign of the commanding presence the Doctor will come to wield much more often in the future.
It's also interesting how the limited special effects of the time make it unclear whether we're looking at Koquillion's actual face or a mask. Had they played it straight and insisted this is what this creature actually looks like, I would have accepted it without question. (Small plot nitpick: when Ian describes having met Koquillion, the Doctor correctly guesses a description of horns and fangs before Ian can even get to that part. But then later we find out the inhabitants of Dido are either human or indistinguishable from human, and the horned guise is just an outfit to be used for ceremonial purposes. It's like hearing that your friend met a random person on a mountain, and then preemptively guessing that this person was wearing the Pope's hat... and being right. Maybe Pertwee's "...all teeth and curls?" line in The Five Doctors is a callback to this little-known ability of the Doctor's.)
Somewhat less pleasant (though no less interesting) was the "In Conversation" interview with Maureen O'Brien, who, if she doesn't outright regret having done Doctor Who, at least feels ambivalent about it to this day. As she describes the loss of her privacy and anonymity, and the way this brief job she had right out of drama school has overshadowed literally everything else in her career, I can certainly understand her having a sort of resentment towards it. When Matthew Sweet informs her that even the most recent reprinting of her detective novel contains "best known for playing Vicki in Doctor Who" in her biographical blurb, a look of horror flashes across her face. "I would never have allowed that if I'd known about it!" Taking all that into consideration it's surprising she wants to have anything at all to do with the show now, in the form of this interview, Behind the Sofa, etc. I'm glad to have her perspective on things even if it isn't all sunshine.
I wish I hadn't been massively spoiled on Koquillion before even having seen it, but I was, so I knew immediately what was going on, unfortunately. Still, I think it would have surprised me - and you're right, the Doctor knew what was going on without telling us, so the reveal would have been pretty cool.
Reprising their roles as the Doctor and companions to go on a timey-wimey spin down memory lane in these unmissable adventures are; Maureen O’Brien and Peter Purves, Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury, Katy Manning and Daniel Anthony, Peter Davison and Janet Fielding, Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, and Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred.