Nothing at The End of The Lane was directly inspired by a one off drama, made, surprisingly, by the BBC, called The Road to Coronation Street. It was a fictionalised account of Tony Warren’s struggle to get the first episode of the Granada soap broadcast. First shown in December 1960, Coronation Street has a strange kind of relationship with Doctor Who. Both shows had an ambitious and creative Canadian backing them, Harry Elton in the former and Sydney Newman in the latter. Both are from Toronto, though there is an age gap and I don’t think they knew each other. Coronation Street was an attempt to capture the imaginations of ordinary viewers at a time when TV was largely highbrow stuff. Doctor Who, three years later, was an attempt to recapture viewers who had liked that common touch and had deserted the BBC for the popular ITV shows. William Russell as ‘dishy’ Ian Chesterton was Doctor Who’s answer to ‘dishy’ William Roache as Ken Barlow. Yes, they really were both pin up boys of their day. Look at their contemporary pictures side by side and you can see what the producers had in mind.

The Road To Coronation Street was a very interesting drama on many levels. By the end of it I was considering what might be on the cards for the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who in three years time. And from there came the idea of writing something similar about those hectic days of 1963.

I needed a pair of eyes to witness those events, and like Doctor Who’s companions, it really needed to be somebody with an ordinary Human eye to see it through. While considering the problem I remembered a book I read when I was at school. It was one of a very out of date set of career choice books which told fictional stories of characters in various jobs. One of them was about a young woman who starts working as a secretary at BBC TV Centre and works her way up to a minor job on a production crew. It was interesting in that it didn’t present working for the BBC as a glamorous or privileged job, which was probably the intention. The problem was it was written in the early 1960s when jobs were plentiful and it was 1979, when the recession was about to bite and jobs anywhere were becoming scarce, so it was useless as careers advice. But I actually quite liked the story at the time.

The idea of telling the making of Doctor Who through a fictitious character who comes down from the typing pool to Verity Lambert’s office and finds herself increasingly involved in something amazing. Sally Whelan was thus created. Actually, for two pages she was Daisy Whelan, but I kept thinking of daisy wheel printers and that seemed too corny for a secretary. Mind you, on reflection, maybe it would have worked.

Anyway, Sally is a product of the post-war secondary school system. She probably went to a secondary modern school rather than a grammar school, receiving a vocational education aimed at getting her a good job until she married and kept house. She isn’t stupid, but she isn’t the top end of the educational scale, either. She comes from an upper working class, mostly white suburb of London. Waris Hussein, an educated coloured man, surprises her. So does Verity Lambert, an educated career orientated woman. There would still be an expectation, even in the BBC, that attractive young women would get married and leave their jobs. Anyone over 30 still working there would be a plain Jane destined to be an old maid – Miss McIntyre, supervisor of the typing pool is a case in point. Verity was one of the first to break that mould. From all I know about her, she worked hard to be taken seriously in a male-orientated profession, paving the way for women like Julie Gardner who produced the revived Doctor Who series from 2005 with far less opposition.

The question does still arise, though. Did the powers that be give Doctor Who to a female producer and an Indian born director because they expected it to fail and could blame them if it did? Not a pretty thought. But their scepticism backfired if it was so.

The actual sequence of events leading up to November 23rd 1963 didn’t need a lot of research. Long before Doctor Who Confidential there used to be a lot of books about the history and the making of my favourite television programme. When I wasn’t reading books about careers in television, I was reading those. When it came to writing a fictional account of the origins of Doctor Who I could very nearly do it with my eyes shut. A few details have been changed. The casting of Susan happened slightly differently. The arrival of the Daleks wasn’t the same day an episode was recorded. And I really don’t have a clue what Verity’s office looked like or if she even had a personal assistant. Even so, the only things I actually had to research were the actual date of the Great Train Robbery and what time the Kennedy assassination took place – and the likely time the newsflash would have been broadcast on the BBC.

The rest is history. .

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ttj2r
http://coronationstreet.wikia.com/wiki/Harry_Elton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Newman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verity_Lambert

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Television_Centre

http://www.rdwf.org.uk/origins.htm