Saturday Night Starts Here

Over the last year or so I’ve been renting “classic” Doctor Who DVDs off LoveFilm. On the one hand this is a way of indulging my own geekery but it also means I have something to watch with the kids. As the disks are from episodes from the early 60s through to the late 80s (and in no particular order) I keep getting asked “which Doctor Who is this.” I did think they meant which actor was playing the lead role but I have noticed more and more that they mean which opening titles are being used. This was confirmed to me at the weekend when I re-watched the Christmas episode and Raymond commented on how the new title sequence had copied elements from the shows 50 year history:
I hadn’t really given it that much thought but one of the unique features of the show, right from the start, is that the opening titles are quite unlike anything else on TV. It’s probably the first thing I can actually remember about the show, a strange electronic signature tune and surreal psychedelic images that announced to the world: “Saturday Night Starts Here”. The actual title sequence has changed significantly over the years but it must have been quite something else back in 1963 when the first titles appeared using a technique called “Howl-Around” whereby a TV camera was turned onto it’s own monitor with bizarre effects:
The other thing to note with this title sequence was the electronic theme performed by Delia Derbyshire – utilising effects techniques that were rarely heard outside of Avant-Garde circles. She updated the music again in 1966 to go with a refreshed title sequence now featuring the face of Patrick Troughton. To my mind, this doesn’t work quite as well as the original “Howl-Around” sequence but the music does feel more imposing:
1970 brought the advent of colour TV and a new Doctor. The production team tried to reproduce the “Howl-Around” effect in colour but the results were disappointing. The actual sequence used was achieved by colourising a black-and-white image but I mostly saw this in black-and-white anyway as we didn’t have a colour TV at the time. I did occasionally see it in its full Technicolor glory at my grandparents house and was rather taken with the blood-red opening but I think it lost the idea of time-travel at this point (as did the show itself):
In 1973 the opening sequence was remade using a technique called “Slit-Scan”. This was pioneered in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and was later used in Star Wars (the Millennium Falcon hitting light speed) and Star Trek (the Enterprise going warp-speed). If you look carefully, the Doctor Who sequence only uses a few seconds of footage but the join is seamless. This classic “time tunnel” opening is (almost) my favourite title sequence and was used for most of Tom Baker’s reign as the Doctor. It was also the first to feature the TARDIS in the titles but Baker’s first series only used the TARDIS prop two times: once to get on the Arc In Space and once to get off again:
When John Nathan Turner took over the show he replaced the time tunnel with an animated “Star Field”. Aside from looking like a mid-90’s screen-saver he also updated the music with a synthesiser arrangement by Peter Howell. In retrospect it isn’t actually that bad but at the time I was mortified as this series that was supposed to be about time-travel was now changed into one about space-travel: a kind of low-rent Star Wars. Tom Baker left at the end of the first series that utilised this sequence and it was used in amended form throughout Peter Davison’s tenure in the TARDIS (which, ironically, tended to have many stories about travelling in time but not space):
The “Star Field” was modified again for Colin Baker. He also received some revised music which, as far as I can tell, was composed on a Commodore-64. At least there was now a “hint” of time-tunnel about it:
The last title sequence of the original series featured Sylvester McCoy before he became a wizard in The Hobbit. I think the titles are a bit of an improvement as it now sounds like it was composed on mid-80s synths and the images are pleasingly surreal (why the crystal ball?) apart from “The Wink”: Why, Sylvester, why?
The Doctor Who TV Movie of 1996 finally introduced an orchestra to the proceedings. For all the failings of this venture it is clearly a stepping-stone between the low-budget series of old and the high-budget 21st Century incarnation:
Russell T Davies brought the show fully back to life in 2005 and he clearly has similar tastes to myself as far as the aesthetics of the show are concerned. The opening sequence combines the time-tunnel idea (or possibly more of a worm-hole idea going on) and even incorporates elements of the original 1963 theme tune alongside the BBC orchestra. Saturday Nights were back!
And that brings us up to date with Matt Smith’s Doctor and a revised theme and opening sequence. It’s a bit of a curate’s egg as I like the visuals but I think the theme tune is over-egging it somewhat:
So that is 50 years worth of Saturday Night Fever (apart from the 80’s when they put it on at the same time as Corrie – but I’d rather not go there). As for my favourite, it’s the “Slit-Scan” opening from the 1970s but not quite the Tom Baker one. The sequence was introduced in 1973 when Jon Pertwee was at the TARDIS controls and his version included a brief star tunnel sequence at the beginning as well as having the titles reversed at the end (to give the impression of traveling backwards). This is how Saturday Night is meant to start: