William Hartnell’s original script from the very first episode of Doctor Who has been sold at auction for £6,200 plus fees, taking the total to £7,500. Anthony Coburn’s An Unearthly Child, billed as episode one of the story Doctor Who and the Tribe of Gum, runs to 43 pages.
The script still includes blue pencil annotations by Hartnell himself, who took on the role of Doctor Who in 1963, having previously starred in sitcom The Army Game and in Carry On Sergeant, the first in the long-running series of Carry On movies.
Mirroring the fate of many early episodes of the show itself, the script was nearly lost: a builder fortunately found the script among rubbish that was to be thrown out while renovating Hartnell’s former home in East Sussex in the 1960s. He in turn gave it to his grandson, who was a huge Doctor Who fan, and kept hold of it until today’s sale at Aston’s Auctioneers in Dudley.
The script was shown on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow in December 2017, where Chris Yeo said: “This is the very first Doctor Who story. It’s the DNA of Doctor Who, the genesis of the programme, which makes it very important.”
The seller, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “I was eight and went to see my grandfather in the summer. He gave me it because I was a Doctor Who fan. I read it. There was some technical stuff in there that I didn’t understand but it stayed with me when I moved around the country.”
An Unearthly Child introduced viewers to the character of the Doctor when school teachers Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) follow one of their pupils, Susan (Carole Ann Ford), home from school, to discover that she lived in the Tardis with her grandfather.
Also on sale in the auction was a full set of camera scripts for Patrick Troughton’s Doctor Who adventure Fury From the Deep, one of the stories that is missing from the BBC’s archive.
