Doctor Who at 50: The Tribe Of Gum

And so here we are, at the remaining three episodes of the very first Doctor Who adventure, sometimes known as An Unearthly Child, occasionally called 100,000 BC, variously referred to as The Tribe Of Gum, and more commonly thought of as the story that hardly anyone bothers to watch once they’ve got past the iconic first episode.
For a series that returns so often to certain time zones (Victorian London at Christmastime, for instance), it’s perhaps odd that The Doctor and his crew have only really bumped into cavemen just the once, in the very first story. Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor does actually meet another caveman much later, but that doesn’t really count, since the caveman is out of his own time – which just so happens to be Victorian London.

The templates for the early series are formatted right here. It doesn’t matter that the show itself will go through a fair amount of personality changes before the year is out – all out sci-fi, US style Saturday afternoon serial, and at one point, something very close to Argento – the cast already know the parts they’re meant to play: The Doctor is the strange alien, Susan is a slave to her emotions, and Barbara is the one that expels a great deal of energy into keeping everybody sane. In addition, we have Ian as the resourceful hero. It’s a role that doesn’t always do him favours, however: Because he’s so entirely practical, he isn’t quite able to cope when things don’t go his way, or when he doesn’t understand what’s going on (like being transported hundreds of thousands of years before his birth, for instance). Barbara, for all her careful composure, is much more skilled at simply reacting – bending to the will of events that threaten to entirely demolish Ian’s comprehension.

It’s a small thing, but nobody points out that the TARDIS has travelled in space as well as time, (albeit a few thousand miles, rather than several light years) somewhat giving the impression that the Tribe Of Gum’s cave is in the rough location of Coal Hill School as opposed to, say, Africa. The Doctor’s muttering about the chameleon circuit not working – that the spaceship is still in the shape of a London Police Box – actually raises more questions than it answers. You wonder what The Doctor and Susan were doing in 1960’s London for six months. Remembrance Of The Daleks will attempt to suggest that he’s busy burying the Hand of Omega, but this doesn’t really make sense for a being that’s apparently on the run from the Timelords in a spaceship that he has a) stolen, and b) cannot fully control. And, indeed, why is it in the shape of a Police Box? If the whole point of a Chameleon Circuit is to blend the TARDIS into its immediate surroundings, then it has failed on every level: in the previous episode, Ian takes time to remind us that Police Boxes aren’t found in junkyards, that they’re more commonly glimpsed in the streets. Which prompts the reasonable (if Reading-Into-Things-A-Bit-Too-Deeply) question here: why the hell is the TARDIS disguised as a Police Box? It brings to mind the rather odd possibility that the TARDIS initially landed elsewhere, and The Doctor, needing to park it elsewhere but not trusting his own piloting skills enough to keep them on twentieth century Earth, having to resort to some heavy lifting with Susan down a Sixties high street. It’s also fascinating to note that The Doctor keeps all the TARDIS ‘codes’ in a notebook. He’s got one of the most advanced modes of transport in the universe, but he only knows how to use it because of some pencil-scrawled notes.
But meanwhile, the gang are being ganged up on by a tribe of remarkably well-spoken cavemen. (although, it’s equally likely that the TARDIS translation circuits are simply altering the tribe’s grunts into well-mannered English, because that’s the language that Ian and Barbara speak, and will therefore understand more readily. It’s presumably why most of the characters in the seventies adventures talk like energy conscious vegetarians, and a high percentage of the girls since 2009 are very flirty and self assured. While we’re on that, if the TARDIS has immediately begun to translate for Ian and Barbara, it means that either The Doctor or the TARDIS itself has already decided to trust the humans (which makes The Doctor’s line in The Snowmen – ‘I never know why, I just know’ even more poetic). It also suggests that The Doctor himself isn’t actually speaking English – which, in turn, indicates that Susan has to learn English on order to survive a term at Coal Hill.
It could go terribly wrong for the show at this point, to have the main villains a bunch of grunting men in animal skins. But the delay on any kind of futuristic environment will make Skaro even more shocking when it does eventually show up, and this racing around prehistoric caves works much better as a bonding exercise for Team TARDIS than The Daleks would (where, being on a futuristic planet inhabited by aliens would mean that Ian and Barbara would feel the need to defer much more to The Doctor, and if the first story had been Planet Of The Giants - as originally intended - then the humans would have likely spotted a lot more quickly that they had never actually left Earth, meaning that the power balance would have then shifted too far back in their direction.

It’s also a clever piece of scripting that, despite what fan memory might suggest, the TARDIS crew don’t actually invent fire for the tribe: brilliantly, the tribe have already created fire, they simply have lost the skill. It’s reasonable to assume that the tribe would have re-discovered fire without Ian’s help: what the ship’s crew actually give to the savages is the concept of liberty and grace. As this story is pretty accurate in terms of the era it is set in - literally, 100,000 years ago - we can be confident that the TARDIS crew are witnessing modern man arrive. And – more importantly than anything to do with fire – may have been responsible nudging modern man into existence.

And it’s worth pointing out again that The Doctor here, calculating, unemotional, panicky, incapable sometimes of furthering the plot and saving everybody, is probably a lot closer to his true character, and not like the one he will constantly strive to be. After all, Tennant’s Doctor will be at pains to remind us that what he has truly done is ‘run away,’ and Eccelston’s Doctor, in one of his first adventures, will simply shut his eyes when faced with danger, and wait to be killed. Here, however, it’s the proximity to two humans that force him to deal with some higher emotions and feelings. We know that Ian and Barbara are not the first humans he’s come into contact with (not if we believe that he’s a regular tea drinker at Mike’s café, anyway), but they are the first that he seems to have the time for. The first story in this series is understandably always sold as a tale of wonder for two disbelieving humans, but viewed within the scope of a fifty year series, it’s as much a tale about The Doctor barely managing to keep up with the surprising and amazing human beings he’s got himself involved with. There’s lots of debate as to whether The Tribe Of Gum really works as the first Doctor Who story, whether or not everybody wouldn’t have been better off if the action had immediately jetted off to Skaro. For my money, it’s actually a great benefit to throw the TARDIS kids off at the deep end in a story that has not much story apart from grim, mud-smeared survival. The very final story of the classic series will take that word as its title, and it’s all the crew will be able to think about for the next couple of weeks. While their attention is diverted elsewhere, they’ll discover that they have – almost accidentally – become friends.

Next time, we’re off to a Dead Planet, to meet some Nazi Dustbins who call themselves The Daleks.