The Beatles & Doctor Who: 15 times they crossed over

Given that they were both obsessions of my young life and seem to have carried on as obsessions in my adult life, it delights me that Russell T Davies has finally, properly put the Beatles into a Doctor Who story.

In some ways it’s amazing that it hasn’t happened before. They are contemporaries. For instance, in March 1962, between The Beatles being rejected by Decca and the death of Stuart Sutcliffe, the BBC’s Head of Light Entertainment commissioned a report on the feasibility of a new science-fiction tv serial, which will eventually be Doctor Who. On 25 July 1962, the month after The Beatles sign with EMI, the first full proposal for Doctor Who was presented to the BBC’s Head of Serials. Three weeks later Ringo joined The Beatles. On 26 March 1963, four days after ‘Please Please Me’ is released, the new Head of Drama at the BBC convened a meeting to firm up plans for this new serial. On 26 April 1963, two days after ‘From Me To You’ first charted, the show was fully commissioned and the recording blocks and budgets were approved. In July 1963, the Beatles released their first EP and William Hartnell was cast as the first Doctor. The Beatles were already a reference in audiences’ minds: In 1964, previewing The Keys of Marinus in April the Daily Express describes the Voord as having heads like ’enormous beetles, the creepy-crawly things, not Ringo & co!’

Their stories run along parallel tracks and sometimes they are distantly connected by the events in their shared world. For instance on 22 November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated: the day after, an extended bulletin about the assassination delayed the start of the first ever episode of Doctor Who by ten minutes, and the first episode was repeated the following week. That same assassination – by creating a sense of national mourning from which the US needed to be rescued – also contributed to the success of The Beatles in North America early the next year.

The Beatles broke up the day before episode 4 of The Ambassadors of Death, a show that more than any announces Doctor Who is saying goodbye to the 60s and reinventing itself for the seventies. Doctor Who and The Beatles both had a dip in their reputations in the 1980s. (John Lennon was shot three-quarters of the way through State of Decay.) Both Doctor Who and The Beatles had brief reunion in the 1990s. In the twenty-first century, both have come roaring back to cultural prominence.

Sometimes, though, the parallel tracks converge, ever so slightly. Here are some examples of when Doctor Who and The Beatles cross over. Buckle up, we’re on the fast lane to Nerd Central. 

1.    Susan Foreman.
In the first episode ever, An Unearthly Child (1963) – the one delayed by reports about the Kennedy shooting- the Doctor has a ‘granddaughter’ (less said about that the better) called Susan doing an unearthly hand jive to a somewhat Shadows-y guitar instrumental, supposedly by John Smith and the Common Men (actually a piece of library music by The Arthur Nelson Group, about whom I know nothing). Her teacher, Ian Chesterton, remarks that ‘John Smith’ is a pseudonym for the (rather less working-class) Hon. Aubrey Waites, which is a witty snapshot of the pre-Beatles British pop scene.

Incidentally, in this episode Susan was played by Carole-Anne Ford, but in 1994 there was a BBC radio play called Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman exploring this fictional character’s life after Doctor Who. She was played by Paul McCartney’s former girlfriend Jane Asher... who also starred in two episodes of the Doctor Who spin-off show The Sarah Jane Adventures, called -- coincidentally? -- ‘Whatever Happened to Sarah-Jane?’

2.    Dalekmania
This emerged around Christmas 1964, with a huge number of toys and other items. The press dubbed it Dalekmania in explicit emulation of Beatlemania. There’s a parallel to be drawn between Dora Bryan’s ‘All I Want for Christmas is a Beatle’ (1963) and The Go-Go’s’ [not the Go-Go’s!] ‘I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With a Dalek’ (1964) (Sample lyrics: ‘I'm gonna spend my Christmas with a Dalek, / And hug him underneath the mistletoe / And if he's very nice / I'll feed him sugar spice / And hang Christmas stocking from his big lead toe’). Amazingly, it didn’t chart.

A more durable musical connection: George Martin produced Bernard Cribbins two hits Hole in the Ground and Right Said Fred. Bernard Cribbins would star in the second Doctor Who movie (Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.) and later in the new series as Wilfred Mott. 

fig. 1

One of the features of Dalekmania was a wealth of merchandising, books, toys, toys, feature films and more. A typical example iss the Louis Marx Daleks, which were a 6½”-high and available either as a battery operated bump-and-go toy or with a friction drive (see fig. 1). It was released in 1965 to coincide with the first Dalek feature film.

fig. 2

But now look, here’s John Lennon at Kenwood in (I think) 1967 (fig. 2) and what does he have on his shelf? A Louis Marx Dalek. Interestingly a year later it’s gone. Maybe Yoko had persuaded him to put away childish things. Maybe he’d given it to Julian? (Though that sounds like an uncharacteristically paternal gesture for 60s John). Who knows, but what we do know is, John. Lennon had a Dalek. (I think I need to credit Daragh Carville for some of the sleuthing here.)



3.    Cannes Film Festival 25 May 1965.
There’s another photo of John Lennon with a Dalek (fig. 3). It’s Cannes and John was there to publicise Help! And the Daleks to publicise the big-screen Dr Who & The Daleks [slow day in the film-naming department]. Help! was released end of July and Dr Who & the Daleks a month later. In case this conjures up a celebratory moment of mutual admiration, I should declare that John Lennon appears to be studiously ignoring the Dalek. Of course he is. He got his own one back at Kenwood.

fig. 3

4.    The Chase [1965].
This is the most famous and legit on-screen crossover. The Beatles appear on the TARDIS’s ‘time-space visualiser’ playing ‘Ticket to Ride’ from a Top of the Pops appearance on 10 April. Their appearance in this episode is the only surviving remnant of that performance – which didn’t stop Apple making it difficult for the BBC to release The Chase on DVD thirty years later. The story of their appearance is actually rather interesting: the BBC approached the Beatles to play themselves, aged thirty years on (in 1996) but Brian Epstein vetoed it (as too off-brand or something). In the actual show the companion Vicki (who is From The Future) refers to them as ’classical music’ and much time-travelling hilarity ensues.

5.    Delia Derbyshire
Delia Derbyshire to score ‘Yesterday’. Okay this isn’t precisely a Doctor Who crossover but Paul supposedly approached Delia D about arranging Yesterday and her most famous piece of music -- and probably the best-known product of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop of which she was part -- is the Doctor Who theme tune. Derbyshire and the Radiophonic Workshop were clearly part of Paul’s interest in experimental music in the mid-60s.

6.    Desmond Leslie
Perhaps slightly related... Desmond Leslie was a fascinating man; a writer and composer, probably most famous for having punched Bernard Levin live on air in 1962. He composed some musique concrète tracks that, as library music, would eventually be used in The Edge of Destruction (1964) and The Space Museum (1965) – but also in the Beatles’s Yellow Submarine movie. He also commissioned one of the first mixing desks in Britain from Rupert Neve (who also built four consoles for George Martin at his AIR Studio in 1969 which is where Paul recorded ‘Live and Let Die’) and it’s still on display at Castle Leslie in County Monaghan (fig. 4) – and Castle Leslie is where Paul married Heather Mills!

fig. 4

7.    Background Music
In Evil of the Daleks (1967), ‘Paperback Writer’ is played in the background of a groovy coffee bar scene. When the BBC sought to release this story commercially decades later, Apple were, of course, happy to oblige. Oh wait a minute, no they weren’t. Groan. (Something similar happened with Remembrance of the Daleks* [1988] which was a sort of informal 25th anniversary story in which the Doctor and his companion go back to London in November 1963 and in one scene the era is evoked by having ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ playing in the background. For the commercial release, Apple - concerned that people would not buy Please Please Me because they would prefer to slip on a DVD, find that scene, and enjoy the song being played under dialogue, a thing that would definitely happen - refused to licence it, so the song has been replaced by a soundalike cover.)

* There are lots of ‘...of the Daleks’ story titles. I think the same people who name Doctor Who stories named the US Beatles albums.

8.    Patrick Troughton’s haircut.

fig. 5

Well to my eyes the Second Doctor has a Beatle haircut. Maybe more precisely a Beatle wig haircut. There’s something here about British eccentricity and the way both the Beatles and Doctor Who are expressing a new kind of Britishness to the world. But maybe it’s also a sign of how the shocking long hair of 1963 has, by 1966, become a familiar and family-friendly signifier of fun.

Mind you, there’s an earlier story that year, The Ark [1966] with a strangely designed alien – the Monoids (fig. 5). Do my eyes deceive me or do they also have Beatle haircuts?

9.    We Are the Walrus
In the tenth anniversary story The Three Doctors, broadcast, um, 11 years after the premiere, the first three Doctors are brought together to combat The Greatest Threat the Universe Has Ever KnownTM. In an effort to explain who they all are to the groovy young companion, Jo, there’s a splendid bit of dialogue:

 

Third Doctor: It’s very simple Jo, I am he and he is me.

Jo: And we’re all together, goo goo g’joob?

Third Doctor: What?

Jo: It’s a song by The Beatles.

Second Doctor (raising a recorder to his lips): Oh really? How does it go?

Third Doctor: Oh do be quiet.

Slightly to everyone’s surprise, Apple have not demanded a cowriting credit on that story.

10. Ghost Line
In one of the last stories of the original series, Ghost Light (1989), the 7th Doctor observes one of the apparently human inhabitants of this Victorian house transforming weirdly. He suggests ‘he’s had a hard day’s night’. 

11. Shared Cast
This is a surprisingly difficult one. The personnel of Doctor Who and The Beatles really have very little intersection. We could probably find more but as far as I can see virtually no one who acted in a Beatles movie also acted in Doctor Who. The main exception would be Eleanor Bron who has a very funny cameo in City of Death (1979) and would take a more prominent role in Revelation of the Daleks, which also features a peculiar DJ, played by Alexei Sayle, who, I seem to remember, has a Beatles poster on his wall. But apart from that the numbers of actors who crossover is vanishingly small; this may be because film stars and TV stars were in different constellations at the time. So the connections are more tenuous and more distant and at times just become six degrees of separation games. But here are some:

  • Lance Percival was a voice artist in Yellow Submarine and later wrote to books of light verse which were illustrated by Lalla Ward, who was a companion in Tom Baker’s last two seasons -- oh and also married and divorced him, and then married and divorced Richard Dawkins, who has a cameo in The Stolen Earth (2008). Percival also wrote the TV game show Whodunnit!which was presented by Jon Pertwee.

  • Geoffrey Hughes was also a voice actor in Yellow Submarine providing Paul McCartney’s voice and he acted in The Ultimate Foe (1986).

  • John Junkin plays Shake, Norman Rossington’s assistant, in A Hard Day’s Night (and also has a small part in How I Won the War). Before this he was part of Associated London Scripts – a collective of TV writers in the 1950s, set up by Spike Milligan, Galton & Simpson, and Frankie Howerd. There he met and started cowriting with Terry Nation who wrote the second ever Doctor Who story – which introduced the Daleks and made the show a success.

  • Speaking of How I Won the War, that film features Sheila Hancock -- who also played a flame-haired Thatcher-adjacent villain in The Happiness Patrol (1988) -- and Jack May who would a little later appear in The Space Pirates (1969).

  • Windsor Davies was in The Family Way (if you’re using a screen reader that’s going to be very confusing) and around the time of its US release he appeared on screen in The Evil of the Daleks (1967), a couple of days before Sgt Pepper was released. Hywel Bennett – also, ahem, in The Family Way – had appeared in The Chase a year earlier (1965).

  • Davies later was a voice in George Martin’s recording of Under Milk Wood (1988), alongside several other Welsh actors who also appeared in Doctor Who and its spin offs including Nerys Hughes (Kinda), Gareth Thomas (Torchwood), Meg Wynn Jones (A Christmas Carol), Philip Madoc (The Krotons, War Games, Brain of Morbius, Power of Kroll – and the Daleks Invasion of Earth movie), Hubert Rees (Fury from the Deep, War Games, Seeds of Doom), Glyn Houston (Hand of Fear), Emrys James (State of Decay), Rhoda Lewis (State of Decay), Clyde Pollitt (War Games, Three Doctors) Gwenyth Petty (who was in the BBC’s red-button interactive Doctor Who game Attack of the Graske [2006]).

  • On a rather different tack, Thomas Sangster was in Human Nature/Family of Blood and played McCartney in Nowhere Boy.

  • There are probably more but this sounds to me like a job for Toby Hadoke…

12. Spin offs
The Beatles feature quite heavily in various spin-off media. There’s a graphic novel The Time of My Life which has the 10th Doctor and Donna going back to the Cavern in the early and seeing The Beatles, a little implausibly, playing ‘My Bonnie’ (presumably because the lyrics are out of copyright, fig. 6).

fig. 6

There’s a Doctor Who audio episode (Fanfare for the Common Men – a reference to the song in the first episode [see No 1]) where Peter Davison’s Doctor takes Nyssa back to November 1963 but the Beatles don’t exist and instead the biggest band is The Common Men. This might be a distant influence on Yesterday? (written by Richard Curtis who also wrote Vincent and the Doctor). Maxwell Edison –he of the Silver Hammer - is a running character in other comics. There are other references in novels like Slow Decay and Gone Too Soon that suggest the Doctor has run into The Beatles before... (full disclosure: I haven’t read those. I’m not that much of a nerd. Okay maybe I am that much of a nerd, but I’ve been busy, okay??). 

13. Asides
In the new (post 2005) series, there are scattered references.

  • §  In 42 (2007), set on board a spaceship slowly crashing into the sun, the onboard computer asks a question about The Beatles as a security question (under the category of ‘Classical Music’, probably an in-joke fan reference to The Chase [see No. 4 above]). Same episode, David Tennant’s Doctor also greets the imminent solar destruction with the words ‘Here comes the sun’.

  • In The Wedding of River Song (2011), Matt Smith’s Doctor lists a few things still on his bucket list: ‘I could invent a new colour, save the Dodo, join the Beatles…’

  • In Spyfall (2020), Hakim, the father of regular assistant Yasmin Khan, comically tries and fails to get Alexa to play Rubber Soul.

14. Abbey Road
On 19 September 2015, the BBC publicised the start of Peter Capaldi’s second season (as 12th Doctor) with a photo of Capaldi, assistant Jenna Coleman, and two Daleks on the Abbey Road pedestrian crossing (fig. 7).

Which, in hindsight, looks like a rehearsal for. 

15. The Devil’s Chord (2024)

The story continues…

Michael Gray

This evening at Royal Holloway, we welcomed Michael Gray, the journalist and author, probably best known for his groundbreaking study of Bob Dylan, Song and Dance Man (1972). I was asked to do the introduction and here’s what I said.

Good evening, my name is Dan Rebellato, I’m a professor in the Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance and I have the honour of introducing this evening’s speaker, Michael Gray.

Notoriously, Bob Dylan is hard to know. This is most vividly on display perhaps in D A Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary, Don’t Look Back, which shows Dylan deploying a formidable mixture of wit, intelligence, and venom to bat away a string of hapless journalists and hangers-on who have made the mistake of presuming to know him. One might see this resistance to being known in the famous handbrake turns Dylan has executed in his career – going folky, going electric, going reclusive, going country, releasing Self-Portrait, becoming born again, releasing ‘Wiggle Wiggle’, starring in an advertisement for Victoria’s Secret, recording a Christmas album, and more – perhaps these we might see them as attempts to shrug off listeners who’ve got too close. These moves say, you think you know me? You don’t know me.

Even the peerless Bootleg Series, releasing a wealth of unheard treasures from the Dylan archive since 1991, might be seen as saying, you thought you knew me back then? You didn’t know the half of it.

Because what does it mean to know someone? In his mischievous recent book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, a collection of responses and reflections on an eclectic list of mostly twentieth-century numbers, I am struck by his discussions of two similarly-titled songs very close together in the book. ‘You Don’t Know Me’ by Eddy Arnold, followed, a few pages later, by ‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’ by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, a pair of songs about the unknowability of others. Of Eddy Arnold’s song of unrequited love, Dylan asks ‘How could she know you? How could she know your wild dreams, your fantasies, nightmares and innermost thoughts, all the things you forbid her to know.’ But of the Harold Melvin he reflects soberly: ‘knowing someone can be a herculean task, a lot of obstacles get in the way’. But he also speculates of ‘You Don’t Know Me’ that the song may play out entirely in the singer’s head, raising the intriguing possibility that the You and the Me are the same person, that we may be frightening strangers to ourselves. ‘A serial killer,’ Dylan remarks darkly, ‘would sing this song’.

I often wonder if Dylan’s unease with being known may derive from an acute sense that he does not fully know himself. The restless longevity of his career may be in part a continual search for a sense of self, alongside a growing awareness of the awkward accommodation of mind to body, of matter to spirit. In this world, as he sings in one song, ‘there’s not even room enough to be anywhere’.

Dylan’s twenty-first-century persona promotes this sense of mystery. A friend of mine worked on the Broadway run of the music-theatre piece based on Dylan songs, Girl from the North Country. The company had reached out to Dylan’s people inviting him to come but got no reply. It seemed he wanted nothing to do with it. But one night the cast, squinting into the auditorium, saw a figure sat by the sound desk, with a hat and a cane, and an unmistakeable silhouette. Very Dylan, to appear from nowhere, sit in darkness, and be gone before you know it, a kind of gentleman thief, a Jack of Hearts flitting through his Shadow Kingdom, only temporarily of this world. ‘Don’t get up gentlemen,’ he sings in ‘Things Have Changed’, ‘I’m just passing through’.

All of this makes Dylan hard to write about without being uneasily aware you may be missing the point, that however robust your arguments, however careful your reading, watching and listening, something will still evade you: that ultimately you know something is happening, but you don’t know what it is.

I have one thing in common with tonight’s speaker Michael Gray that I know about: we’ve both been guests on the excellent Bob Dylan podcast, Is It Rolling Bob?, hosted by Lucas Hare and Kerry Shale. I’m episode 18, Michael is of course episode 21 AND 22. A couple of early episodes featured a long-distance dispute between the rock journalist David Hepworth and the actor Ken Cranham over whether it’s a good idea to see Dylan as literature, Hepworth voting no, Cranham voting yes. The two men were really arguing at cross-purposes, the dispute hanging on whether you think that awarding Dylan the Nobel Prize for literature suggested snootily that he had transcended ‘mere’ popular music or that in giving him the award the Swedish Academy had acknowledged a considerable broadening of the meaning of literature.

But if there’s one person who has helped elucidate these mysteries, to negotiate Dylan’s relationship between the artistic and the popular, between the poet and the song and dance man, it’s Michael Gray. He has been writing about Dylan for an incredible 57 years. He published the first edition of his book Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan in 1972 and it quickly became an essential reference point for anyone who wanted to take Bob Dylan seriously. A second edition followed in 1981, and a third in 1999, at which point it had became so large it had to be split into three volumes for the most recent publication in 2022. As well as these, he’s published the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006 with a 2nd edition in 2008), Outtakes on Bob Dylan (2022), and and his glorious part-biography, part-travelogue about Blind Willie McTell (2008) – the subject of course of one of Dylan’s most astonishing songs, all the more astonishing for having - perversely - been left off Infidels, the album for which it was recorded and going unreleased for over eight years.

Anyone who has delved into the growing literature on Dylan will be familiar with the quarrelsome world of Dylanology: a recent book by one of the leading Dylan experts spends most of its introduction triumphantly finding fault with all the other Dylan experts. I am glad to say that this is a vice Michael Gray does not share; his books are warm, generous invitations to go on a journey of discovery with him into one of the most fascinating figures of the popular culture of our postwar world.

One last personal thought. I was raised on Dylan, my mum – who’s over there! (hi mum) – was and is an obsessive Dylan fan and his music was the soundtrack to my growing up. We didn’t have that many books in the house, but my mum had Dylan’s 1973 Granada paperback Writings and Drawings with the yellow cover. And we had this: in the 2nd edition. On page 154 there is a beautiful typographical image designed to illustrate Dylan’s snaky vocal the line from ‘Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat’from Blonde on Blonde: ‘it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine’ and thirteen-year-old me would put the tape on and trace with my finger the journey of that voice across the page.

It is therefore a great pleasure and privilege to ask you to join me in welcoming Michael Gray.