The Doctor's New Invention
The best way, perhaps, to know if something has become successful in the zeitgeist, is to be parodied. It took Doctor Who a mere 39 days to receive such an honour - a sure way to measure the impact the show immediately had on the general British public.
The Doctor's New Invention
It's a Square World
"Doctor Who?"
"No, not Doctor Who, Doctor Fotheringown!"
— The Doctor's New Invention
The best way, perhaps, to know if something has become successful in the zeitgeist, is to be parodied. It took Doctor Who a mere 39 days to receive such an honour - a sure way to measure the impact the show immediately had on the general British public.
This parody was featured on the TV show It’s a Square World, a sketch-comedy television series which ran between 1960 and 1964, compiling fake news stories from the world’s “eight corners” (hence the name), as well as sketches involving scale models. The show was known to be a precursor for what would become Monty Python’s Flying Circus, especially in the style and tone of the humour presented. The force behind It’s a Square World, Michael Bentine, received a BAFTA for the show in 1962.
In the sketch to parody Doctor Who, the news segment is a BBC reporter interviewing a strange, eclectic scientist called the Doctor, who has invented a rocket, the first to be launched into space by British scientists. This Doctor does not actually know what he is doing, accidentally hitting the launch button and sending the interviewers, as well as the entirety of BBC Broadcasting House out into space, where they find that the world is in fact, a cube.
Although perhaps not the funniest or longest sketch parodying Doctor Who, it is perhaps the most important.
The first of what would become a small sub-genre of Doctor Who parodies came so early that the only thing it had to play off of was Hartnell’s appearance in the first serial. The speed with which such a comedy programme was able to parody Doctor Who and Hartnell’s performance shows just how quickly it had come culturally recognisable. The recognisability was helped by the character of Doctor Fotheringown using Hartnell’s original costume in the sketch. Still, this is an early example of how Doctor Who established a recognisable iconography and premise almost immediately - even before The Daleks launched it into a new level.
This short parody was released on The Aztecs: Special Edition DVD, which was released in the UK in 2013, and is available to view both through physical media and online.