Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child [VHS]

His later incarnations were all eccentric in their different ways, but William Hartnell's original Doctor is an irascible and distinctively alien character, not at all happy having to put up with ignorant 20th-century humans. The "Unearthly Child" of the title is his granddaughter Susan (Carole Ann Ford), temporarily attending school on Earth. She is conspicuously different from her classmates and attracts the attention of two of her teachers, who resolve to find out why. After an encounter with her mysterious grandfather they are whisked away on an adventure to a different time and place, where angry cavemen are trying in vain to learn the secret of fire. Thus the show's trademarks are established from the outset: the Doctor and his more or less reluctant human companions, the mechanical unreliability of the Tardis, the cliffhanger ending of each episode. It was a formula that rarely changed but that allowed apparently limitless variation (the only constraint was the BBC's budget). In later years the show tried vainly to compete with blockbuster special-effects movies, but its original low-key incarnation relied more on inventive scenarios and good writing--qualities that are just as important now as then. --Mark Walker