“Absolutely fascinating and hugely persuasive.” - Robert Shearman
“He has some really serious and fascinating points to make about how television was made and viewed back in the 1960s” - Adventures With the Wife in Space
“Demented rubbish.” - Some random guy on the Internet
Collecting and expanding on the posts from the acclaimed blog TARDIS Eruditorum, this book provides a critical history of the William Hartnell era of Doctor Who. Ambitiously aiming to tell the developing story of Doctor Who from its beginning, TARDIS Eruditorum moves beyond received fan wisdom to treat Doctor Who not just a classic sci-fi show but a show that tells the story of an entire strain of mystical, avant-garde, and radical culture in Great Britain — a show that is quite literally about all of time and space, everything that ever happened, and everything that ever will.
Every essay from the blog has been revised and expanded, and eight new essays have been written specially for this collected edition. Inside, you can learn:
Whether The Celestial Toymaker — long one of the most beloved of Hartnell-era stories — is in fact an irredeemably racist mess.
How the epic The Daleks’ Masterplan is actually four distinct stories, and how the Daleks themselves are not only brilliant monsters, but an outright attack on the very structure of the show.
The way in which the Cybermen, as originally conceived, are a terrifying challenge to the nature of humanity and society inspired as much by mysticism as by science.
And much, much more.
