William Hartnell stories

WILLIAM HARTNELL

The First Doctor (1963-1966)

Selling the first Doctor

• See the table in SELLING DOCTOR WHO for a list of the countries that screened the First Doctor.

The Hartnell series was sold in seven "Groups" of stories.

Click on the story title to go to the list of countries where that serial was screened.

GROUP A

A	An Unearthly Child	4
B	The Daleks	7
C	Inside the Spaceship	2

GROUP B

D	Marco Polo	7
E	The Keys of Marinus	6

• Groups A and B were the biggest selling batch of stories, selling to 34 countries.

GROUP C

F	The Aztecs	4
G	The Sensorites	6
H	The Reign of Terror	6
J	Planet of Giants	3
K	The Dalek Invasion of Earth	6
L	The Rescue	2

• Nine stories from groups A, B and C were dubbed into Arabic.
• The same nine stories were also dubbed into Spanish and Farsi (for Iran).

GROUP D

M	The Romans	4
N	The Web Planet	6
P	The Crusade	4

• Only the second story from Group D was dubbed into Spanish and Farsi (Iran)

GROUP E

Q	The Space Museum	4
R	The Chase	6
S	The Time Meddler	4

• The first two stories from Group E were dubbed into Spanish and Farsi (Iran).
• The fact that the BBC retained the negatives for the majority of Groups A to E (they were found in storage in 1978) could be down to the BBC having negotiated with Actors' Equity, the Writers' Guild and the Musicians' Union some sort of "blanket" sales contract which gave them the ability to sell those 17 stories to a much broader worldwide market, without having to renegotiate residuals and royalties. But come the time to start selling Group F, it may have been that, on seeing how successful those first five Groups had been, the Unions demanded more money and higher residual payments for the later stories, and thus denied the BBC the same level of freedom they had enjoyed with selling the first two years of the fledgling series. For all subsequent "series", the BBC may have had to operate under a completely different set of sales terms and conditions, all of which prevented them from tapping into foreign markets outside the Commonwealth (none of the stories from Group F through to the end of the Patrick Troughton era was sold to a non-Commonwealth country.)
• On that assumption, of course the BBC would hold onto the negatives of those programmes for which it had a greater freedom to sell, and destroy those episodes for which it did not...

GROUP F

T	Galaxy 4	4
U	The Myth Makers	4
W	The Massacre	4
X	The Ark	4
Y	The Celestial Toymaker	4
Z	The Gunfighters	4
AA	The Savages	4
BB	The War Machines	4
CC	The Smugglers	4

• Only six countries (all in the Commonwealth) bought Group F in the 1960s and 1970s.

GROUP G

DD

The Tenth Planet

4

• Only three Commonwealth countries bought this serial, making it the lowest-selling Hartnell serial.

UNSOLD

T/A	Mission to the Unknown	1
V	The Daleks' Master Plan	12

• These two serials were not sold anywhere, mainly due to censorship issues.

.

Hartnell repackaged

From 1985, the BBC reissued the surviving 17 complete Hartnell stories for the United States market, but also sold to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Sweden also aired them in the 2000s.

A	An Unearthly Child	4
B	The Daleks	7
C	Inside the Spaceship	2
E	The Keys of Marinus	6
F	The Aztecs	4
G	The Sensorites	6
J	Planet of Giants	3
K	The Dalek Invasion of Earth	6
L	The Rescue	2

M	The Romans	4
N	The Web Planet	6
Q	The Space Museum	4
R	The Chase	6
S	The Time Meddler	4
X	The Ark	4
Z	The Gunfighters	4
BB	The War Machines	4

• The Time Meddler and The War Machines had only just been recovered from overseas, but in time to be cleared and added to the package.

• The Hartnell to Troughton regeneration scene was apparently spliced onto the end of The War Machines.

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