The original Timeless Children!

It’s BEAUTIFUL. If any single moment in Doctor Who history really changed the show forever, this first, slightly casual mention (which would be elaborated on a bit a couple of weeks later) of the Time Lords in episode six of “The War Games” (May 24th, 1969) was probably it, even more so than the famous handover of the title role at the end of “The Tenth Planet” a few years earlier. The intended joke, for those who aren’t Who fans, is that if Twitter had existed in 1969 then Doctor Who fandom would have shat its pants online just like it did with the “Timeless Child” business in the last couple of years… but it’s also funny cos there’s some truth to it.

I wouldn’t say the Time Lords ruined the show, but they obviously took away some of the mystery behind the Doctor. We kind of knew just who “Who” was. We know “The War Games” came about as it did near the end of 1968 when Derrick Sherwin had to hastily replace two other stories that weren’t working, so he drafted Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke to write this epic that would also have to set up the following season in which the Doctor would be stranded on Earth, and suggested maybe they should finally clear up the Doctor’s origins.

Said origins were apparently very casually discussed, too, Sherwin appears to have just pulled the name “Time Lords” out of his arse while the story was being plotted, and BOOM, just like that the show changed forever without apparently much forethought. Like I said, they don’t ruin the show but it would never really be the same afterwards… and we don’t know yet how the “Timeless Child” will affect the series, but at least it seems to have had more actual thought put into it than the original creation of the Time Lords.

Parenthetically, somewhere in the house I think I still have an old edition of Doctor Who Bulletin (as it then was), must have been from 1989 or ’90, in which one of the letters was from someone writing in DWB‘s patented pissy and moany style as if they were reviewing season 6 in 1969… I no longer recall the details of it (other than the brilliant ending bitching about the next Doctor being played by a comedian), but it was totally in the spirit of this picture and an excellent jab at how just shitty the show’s fandom could be even 30+ years ago…