Talk:An Unearthly Child (TV story)

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Uncredited cast

• Policeman - Reg Cranfield (uncredited)
• Members of Tribe (all uncredited)- Billie Davis, Brenda Proctor, Lyn Turner, Doreen Ubells, Frank Wheatley, Janet Fairhead
• Tribe Children (all uncredited) - Antonia Moss, Julie Moss, Timothy Palmer, David Rosen, Trevor Thomas, Elizabeth White
• Kal's shadow - Leslie Bates (uncredited)
• Double for Kal - Billy Cornelius (uncredited)
• Double for Za - Derek Ware (uncredited)

Above is the list of the uncredited cast that was on the page. It will stay here until, source, not IMDb, are found. MM/Want to talk? 23:02, April 13, 2012 (UTC)

Doctor who?

Completely new here, but during the scene in the TARDIS at the beginning of The Cave Of Skulls, Ian calls The Doctor "Doctor Foreman" to which he replies "Doctor who? I don't know what you're talking about." This is probably worth referencing somewhere on the wiki but I have no idea where the best place would be.

Setantae ☎ 20:50, September 14, 2014 (UTC)

Decimal discussion

Perhaps just a nitpicky situation, but on the recent amendment to the page's plot detailing; "However, she has very curious gaps about present-day culture — for example, she forgets that the UK has yet to adopt a decimal currency." It is certainly the case that the United Kingdom and Ireland would, in real-world instance, collectively decide in 1966 that it would phase into decimal currency by 1971... but since this is about the in-universe occurrences - do we actually have a source to properly define this as being a reference for the entirety of the UK in-universe or are we technically presuming that it's not just related to England? JDPManjoume ☎ 13:18, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

DVD releases

Do all DVD releases show the unaired pilot episode first if Play All is selected? Gilgamesh de Uruk ☎ 07:55, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Update to mention Tribe of Gum Controversy?

Basically the title, should we add mention of the whole controversy going on, especially as it now official that the BBC have lost the rights? – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Brigadier-tc (talk • contribs) .

I'd rather wait a little longer until we know a few more details. Bongo50 ☎ 16:27, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

Alright fair enough. Brigadier-tc ☎ 16:38, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

Wife in Space

Genuinely, in what sense is Neil and Sue Perryman's blog and its accompanying memoir an episode guide or reference book? -- Tybort (talk page) 21:26, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

If anything, including any of those sources, save maybe The Discontinuity Guide, listing episode 1 and 2-4 as separate stories, gives precedence to fans over the Doctor Who production office and is pushing T:NPOV. -- Tybort (talk page) 22:48, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

"Reference book" is Wiki-speak for any Doctor Who-related non-fiction book, as distinct from the narrower sense I suppose you're working from. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:09, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

OK, so that's literally worse than my working assumption. Why is a non-fiction and from what I gather self published memoir that's mostly about watching a show and the two people's romantic relationship any kind of authority or precedent holder over what is or is not for the production of a TV show? I could say and publish on social media that Rose is the tenth story of the fifth series and is also a nine-parter, that still wouldn't will it as such. -- Tybort (talk page) 23:19, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

No, but if you published a book claiming as much and it garnered significant attention in the fandom, that would be a notable fact about the public reception to An Unearthly Child. We're not arguing about tablets of law here, or an underlying objective reality. How people lump and number serials post hoc is a sociological observation about trends in fandom, critical thought, and BBC record-keeping. "Wrong" ideas that gain significant public acknowledgement are as notable as "true" (BBC-ordered) data. And certainly Wife in Space is a very significant book as far as non-BBC-authored non-fiction goes, at about the same level as AHistory, About Time, TARDIS Eruditorum, etc. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:24, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Wrong ideas are by their very essence false and fallacious. Kate Bush still did not write Kinda even though it's jokingly treated as fact within the Wife blog. RTD mistakenly believed for decades his own unmade script was similar to The Long Game and that story is all over the place. Also, nothing links to Neil and Sue's blog besides this (fallacious) passage, while links to almost every other thing I've seen listed (apart from maybe Eruditorum) has been on real world and behind the scenes sections all over this wiki. By definition that's not equivalent in significance. -- Tybort (talk page) 23:39, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

No pages that link to Neil Perryman mention the blog either (though the page itself does). -- Tybort (talk page) 23:43, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Then the error is in the other direction. We should definitely have a page on Wife if we don't already, and the redlink indicates as much.

The Wife-specific Kate Bush joke might be another matter, but certainly RTD's own wrong beliefs, expressed in a variety of notable reference sources, should be recorded as wrong beliefs somewhere on the Wiki. All our TV stories have a "Myths" section for similar reasons. We are historians of Doctor Who fandom and production, as much as we are recorders of the fictional contents of actual Doctor Who media. Documenting errors, controversies, etc. is part of that duty.

And again I stress that I don't think there's any comparison between false empirical claims, and differing classification systems. There's no fact of the matter as to whether AUC is best considered as a story in its own right distinct from the cavemen episodes; it's a critical position, a literary conceit. You can't put the serial in a supercollider to try and see whether it's "really" two distinct stories or not. That it was commissioned in one way is a fact; that a number of published works evidencing the views of Doctor Who fandom and critics say something else is another fact. These facts are both interesting and should both be recorded. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:47, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Technically the Eruditorum thread from the old forums never actually came to a 100% clear solution on how to cover things from it, Czech didn't want to use it to base policy off of because it was a "special snowflake". But T:UNOFF REF and Tardis:Resources still remain in conflict as to whether or not we can use websites to this day. We really do need a thread to go over this issue in more detail. Najawin ☎ 23:52, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Aye, but it's a book too, is the point. We don't need it to consider it as 'simply' a blog. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:53, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't even see how UNOFF REF or Resources plays here. Wife in Space is a fan watching episodes of a show with his non-fan wife and recording and transcribing on the spot reactions of Sue's first viewing. If 700 pages linked there and it was a page on Tardis Wiki that would still be the case. It is not Doctor Who scholarship. It is closer in purpose to a law (but not necessarily Doctor Who) expert reacting on YouTube to a trial on the show.

Unsurprisingly (to me anyway), the blog lists the four episodes in one place (unsecure link). The separation of scores is attributed entirely to Sue "enjoy[ing] the first episode a great deal, but the remaining episodes got bogged down in the politics of the cavemen, and she didn’t really care about them that much." Neil uncontroversially calls all four episodes one collective story story when he writes

When I ask my wife to score the four episodes collectively known as – actually, let’s not get into that now – she doesn’t hesitate:

Sue: Three out of 10.

So the whole bit about Wife in Space (the blog and accompanying book) definitively considering it two stories, even as a massive rulebend if not lie to call a reference book, isn't backed up. Like I prefer the Vardan part of Invasion of Time to the Sontaran and hospital corridor TARDIS part. It is still, as released on digital and physical media, and production terms, and to me subjectively, one story. -- Tybort (talk page) 17:48, 4 December 2023 (UTC)