I’m putting together a piece on influences on Doctor Who, and wanted to dig back into the original BBC studies for a couple of quotes from the time before the show. I remembered reading some written archive documents the BBC digitised. I sort of knew where I’d seen them. I even thought I’d blogged about it (can’t find it if so). Of course nothing stays fixed on the web, and a few minutes looking something up soon took a couple of hours. I share my findings in case others have use (and I might need them again later).

The Genesis of the Doctor

I soon found the BBC news article I remembered from 2008 (I must have read it more recently): Doctor Who (before the Tardis). If you click through it even has a couple of the images in question. It also has a link digitised on the BBC Archive website. Sadly the link is no more. Good old BBC!

The TARDIS wiki had some of the information I wanted under 1962 (production) including the Poul Anderson novel Guardians of Time. Sadly it wasn’t everything I needed.

I did find a list of links to scans of something called P as B documents (programme as broadcast). Not my kind of thing but you might be interested: P as B list. There are some HTML errors on the page, a message saying it’s no longer updated and several links don’t work. This includes Dimensions in Time, so not all bad news!

This then lead me to find a fascinating (and well maintained site) call The Doctor Who Cuttings Archive, so the time wasn’t all wasted.

Finally I found what I wanted on a site named Mighty Mega. Under the snappy title of BBC: The Genesis of Doctor Who I found just what I was after. Now, what was I actually trying to look up…