William Hartnell

[Darth_Daver]

Wow. I'm loving his performance.

Unearthly Child he was all over the place. Crazy, angry, smart, stupid, you name it.

In Daleks he was much better, except the whole stupid thing about the fluid link, then giving it to Ian, than losing it... But at least with the Thals he was Doctor-y.

Then I watched the Aztecs. It was amazing. The Doctor was perfect (and hell, he knew how to turn that woman's head ), he was all Time Lordish with that "You don't know what you're doing, you can't change the future". He was wise, he had plans (although he got fooled by the warrior guy...), he was loveable

Next up on my classic Who runthrough is Dalek Invasion of Earth. I'm sooooo looking forward to it

 

[FalTorPan]

Hartnell's Doctor seems to be underappreciated. The first Doctor was much more than a "grump."

If you are interested in another great first Doctor story, I recommend "The Time Meddler."

 

[Candlelight]

Hartnell isn't very prominent in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, mainly cos her hurt his back in rehearsals during Ep2, and thus plays a minor role in Ep3 and is absent from Ep4 (from memory). OR he's absent from Ep3.

Been a while since I saw it. It's a pity classics like The Massacre are missing as he played two roles in that one.

 

[The Nth Doctor]

The Aztecs is one of my favorite First Doctor serials. William Hartnell was absolutely wonderful in it.

 

[davejames]

I liked Hartnell too; it's just a shame his Doctor was so often in the background.

 

[23skidoo]

I liked Hartnell too; it's just a shame his Doctor was so often in the background.

I think it worked to his advantage, though, because it allowed him to keep his air of mystery. On the other hand he often came across as more "real" than the later Doctors thanks to the fact the BBC rarely allowed retakes of scenes, so if Hartnell stumbled over a line of dialogue (and there's some hilarious examples of this out there) or got his timing wrong on a scene, it got left in - and in real life we never get retakes, either.

Alex

 

[The Castellan]

You outta see the new First Doctor figure that's out now, and it comes with a black Dalek as well.

 

[Captaindemotion]

I liked Hartnell too; it's just a shame his Doctor was so often in the background.

I think it worked to his advantage, though, because it allowed him to keep his air of mystery. On the other hand he often came across as more "real" than the later Doctors thanks to the fact the BBC rarely allowed retakes of scenes, so if Hartnell stumbled over a line of dialogue (and there's some hilarious examples of this out there) or got his timing wrong on a scene, it got left in - and in real life we never get retakes, either.

Alex

Yes, but the Doctor is smarter than most real-life people! He shouldn't make mistakes like we do!

 

[The]

You outta see the new First Doctor figure that's out now, and it comes with a black Dalek as well.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

The Hartnell stories are just fantastic, and so are the production values of some of the early shows, plus i love the big spacious interior look of the Tardis...Oh and mark me up for as another big Aztecs fan, that's a brilliant serial.

And the best thing i love about the Hartnell season is that i have seen only what's been released on DVD, so its all new to me, which is brilliant.

 

[Captain Dago]

Hartnell is woefully underappreciated, IMHO. If it hadn't been for his portrayal, there would have been no further Doctor Who. His was a wonderfully mercurial Doctor. He could be icy, remote and calculating, then avuncular and charming all in the same story. He was capable of towering fury and eye-twinkling humor. I was devastated when he was replaced, though I grew to love Troughton.

 

[OmahaStar]

Hartnell is woefully underappreciated, IMHO. If it hadn't been for his portrayal, there would have been no further Doctor Who.

I understand what you're saying, but I'd suggest that Troughton is even more important. If he had failed in his portrayal as the newly-revived Doctor, that would have been the end of the series. We wouldn't be here today discussing Hartnell (or Smith, or any of the others) were it not for Doctor Two.

 

[Tomalak]

^
^
^
So strange how the black and white version of the figure looks more like Hartnell than the colourful one!

Fantastic Doctor, and a great actor. People often dismiss him as old and forgetful, but all that business with getting the names wrong was scripted. (Okay, there's the odd "Magic Chen" and "radiation gloves", but not bad for as-live recording...) He's a phenomenal actor, and gives a lot of powerful performances as the Doctor, especially in the first season when he is an edgier character.

He's peerless in The Daleks' Master Plan, and has a wonderful speech at the end of The Massacre that's pretty much my favourite Doctor monologue.

Just a shame there's a chunk of his stories missing.

 

[The Castellan]

That's the prototype figures....the production ones actually look better than prototypes...which is a rare thing these days, since it's often the other way around.

 

[23skidoo]

I understand what you're saying, but I'd suggest that Troughton is even more important. If he had failed in his portrayal as the newly-revived Doctor, that would have been the end of the series. We wouldn't be here today discussing Hartnell (or Smith, or any of the others) were it not for Doctor Two.

I'm going to side with this view as well. Not to downplay Hartnell's importance by any means, but remembering such a cast change had never happened before in television, it was a huge gamble, and had Troughton not caught on, the show would have ended. (Although researching some of the history I'm finding that Pertwee might have been even more important as the show ground out in the ratings at the end of Troughton's time, so Pertwee had even more challenges than Troughton did when he took over the show when it was still riding high.)

Of course, the argument that #2 is more important than #1 runs into a snag if you consider that, by extension, that would make George Lazenby more important than Sean Connery to the Bond films!

Alex

 

[Starkers]

Well in many ways he is because he proved that the public would accept someone else as Bond, and someone who wasn't the greatest actor in the world either. Made all the harder because Connery was Bond for a lot longer than Hartnell was the Doctor.

 

[Captaindemotion]

^ Well, arguably they didn't accept him, given that OHMSS pretty much flopped at the box office.

So I guess that makes Roger Moore, the first person not called Sean Connery to make a commercial success of a Bond movie, the most important 007!

 

[The]

In many respects, Troughton, Davison, and Eccleston are three of the most important actors in Doctor Who. Each had to carry the audience through a radical change...

 

[Captain Dago]

I'm not downgrading the importance of Troughton. Although Hartnell was my first, "the Trout" is still my favorite Doctor. All I'm saying is that Hartnell is underappreciated by most -- probably because not many of the fans on this board, readers of DWM, etc., actually remember his stories or have seen more than the few still extant. It always saddens me to see him come in so low-ranked in polls, etc. He was a fine actor and set the bar high for the Doctor.

To paraphrase the Bard, "For several virtues have I like several Doctors."

 

[Piper]

The Sixties remains my favourite era of Who, and, though there are lots of reasons for that, there are two main ones: Hartnell and Troughton. Pat is my favourite Doctor, but Hartnell was brilliant, and set the template for all that was to come.

Though spotting "Billy fluffs" is great fun, he was also, throughout his run, a deceptively strong actor - witness his soliquoy in Inside the Spaceship, his farewell to Susan in The Daleks' Invasion of Earth, his facing down the War Machines in that eponymous story, or even what sounds to have been a very playful, jolly performance, belying his reported ill health, in his penultimate story The Smugglers.

The first three years of Who were by far the most exciting - the show's format hadn't been settled yet, leading to a far greater experimentation in the types of story told. Sometimes they worked - The Daleks, Marco Polo, The Crusaders - and sometimes they didn't - The Web Planet - but there isn't a single story which doesn't have something interesting going on or is worth looking at again. I'd rather watch a boring Hartnell, like The Space Musuem, than a tedious Pertwee or something like The Sun Makers. And I maintain that one of the most successful Tardis crews were the initial four.