Watching early episodes of Doctor Who can be a challenge. The plots move at a far slower pace than the modern version, the sets and effects are undeniably more primitive, the mistakes are often as not left in, the scripts are occasionally lacking in refinement or drafting. To make it even harder for the modern audience, from 1963 to 1969 the series was also produced and transmitted in monochrome.

Persevering pays off, however. In recent times Hartnell stories have been ‘rediscovered’. The release of the audio soundtracks and the ‘tele-snaps’ and the unearthing of episodes from ‘The Crusade’ and ‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’ have encouraged almost a whole new branch of Doctor Who theory. Fans now champion purely historical adventures as lost classics rather than as failed experiments in idealistic didacticism. Where once we saw the Troughton ‘base-under-siege’ story or the Philip Hinchcliffe run of horror pastiches in the 1970s as ‘true’ Doctor Who, there is now a drive to rediscover the original – the pure version of Doctor Who – of the early to mid 1960s. This revival, coupled with the ongoing release of the existing Hartnell stories on video and DVD, raises some specific questions, not least: what the effect on the viewer is of watching black and white television when the norm is colour. This may seem like a simple, even a pointless thing to ask. The main difference between monochrome and colour is that monochrome is in shades of grey, while colour is in shade of red, green, blue or, in the 1970s, mostly beige and brown. But it goes deeper – these days, monochrome means something more than just black and white – it signifies the authentic, the real past. Monochrome means history.

In his book Monochrome Memories, Paul Grainge examines the modern use of black and white in film, television and magazines suggesting that,

‘monochrome is part of an iconic repertoire and is used without any particular reverence for its representational and/or historical authenticity; it contributes to the more general breakdown of distinctions between fact and fiction, representation and experience.’

For Grainge, monochrome is a way of replicating the past in a manner that seems authentic – the best example of this in film is Schindler’s List where black and white is used to be historicise and to memorialise the events and to imbue the film with a kind of historical sincerity. Monochrome becomes part of what Grainge suggests is a drive towards accessing an unmediated, authentic depiction of the past, untainted by genre.

So how does this affect the way we watch pre-colour Doctor Who? Clearly, Doctor Who in the 1960s isn’t using black and white for aesthetic purposes, but rather out of technical and economic necessity. But the cultural significance of monochrome has changed in recent decades – it no longer suggests simply primitivism or cheapness, but rather implies archive, history, unmediated reality.

Interestingly, the best example of the effect of this in Doctor Who can be seen in the colour stories in the early 1970s. Owing to the BBC’s destruction of archive material, some of Jon Pertwee’s episodes only exist in black and white recordings. Gradually they are being colourised – but some were released on video with a mixture of colour and monochrome episodes. In ‘The Mind of Evil’, for example, it is fascinating that the black-and-white actually adds to the quality of the story. The monochrome episodes seem gritty, nourish in a way more authentic, while the colour episodes seem garish and affected. The effects, such as the ubiquitous use of CSO at the time, are easier to ignore without colour. Monochrome has moved from signifying old and obsolete, to signifying real and classic.

One reason the Hartnell years have become more popular is that since the series ended, and even more since the new series began, there is a drive to search for the pure version of Doctor Who, the ur-text unsullied by bases-under-siege or by affected eccentricity. The monochrome nature of these early episodes contributes to this drive and the modern viewer on watching them feels a little like an archaeologist or historian, unearthing the truth.

This feeling is compounded by the DVD format. Each episode is cleaned and scrubbed, presented with analytical documentaries and commentaries or clips from contemporaneous programmes such as Blue Peter. Some DVDs, such as ‘The War Machines’ (which includes a history of the Post Office Tower featuring an interview with Tony Benn) even include documentaries putting the story into an historical context. The DVDs also regularly include production or marketing documentation: copies of the Radio Times or designs or scripts of the story in PDF. The DVDs, in short, join the primary source material, the episodes, with secondary source material to produce a guide to historical study. The DVDs are playing to the fans desire to be an historian by emphasising the archival nature of the episodes.

But there is an irony. In the desire of the restoration team to present each episode in as pristine a quality as possible and in the desire of the viewer to see and to analyse and understand, the original has actually been forgotten. Televisions in the 1960s were, compared to now, tiny, hissing and popping, static ridden objects. They were unreliable, they were flickery. The picture quality was blurred and indistinct, the sound quality was not much better. To the modern viewer who craves forty-inch, high-definition, even 3D quality, this seems like the dark ages of television. What possible benefits could there be to have a television that obscures rather than shows?

We watch ‘An Unearthly Child’ today and we’re immune to it. We’ve all seen generations of stories and Doctors, we’ve seen CSO and CGI. But to understand the impact of that first episode, it needs to be seen (or rather unseen) not on DVD but on a primitive television set in a darkened room. On DVD we can see the joins and every detail of the set, every glitch and twitch in the acting. Watching it then on a television set already flickering and phasing in an out we see something else. It has been suggested elsewhere that the reason programmes such as Jonathan Miller’s 1968 adaptation of ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’ or Quatermass and the Pit were so successful is that the old television sets actually suggested a haunting – the images on the screen seemed like ghosts, white, blurred, indistinct – from another place. Now imagine watching the Hartnell title sequence – the howl-around and weird, at the time unique, electronic arrangement of the music. It must have seemed like something unknown, something different had haunted or invaded the television set. Those titles in many ways replicated the effect of a television gone wrong and thus left the viewer uncertain and unprepared for the programme that followed.

This puts a new slant on the famous cliffhangers as well. Think about the end of episode one of the first Dalek story. One of the Doctor’s companions, Barbara, presses her back against a wall as plunger inches into view at the bottom of the screen – and she screams. Watched now, we know what it is – an appendage of a Dalek, we know what happens – watching on DVD we see and know everything. Watching on DVD we can also skip to the next episode in an instant. Back then it would have been impossibly dramatic. Not only would the viewer not know what was at the other end of the plunger, they would have wondered if they saw a plunger at all. No repeats, no rewind, no knowledge of fifty years of Doctor Who, a week’s wait and an indistinct picture – this was all the viewer had in December 1963. This is the historical truth, the authentic past that fans search for as amateur media historians. This also goes some way to explaining the popularity of the Daleks – not their design or their concept or subtextual significance – but the fact that they were new, unexpected – and difficult to see.

The closest we have these days to this feeling can actually be seen in the latest season – throughout the opening six episodes Steven Moffat has inserted brief, disjointed clips of a mysterious, eye-patch wearing lady into scenes she simply does not belong. The first reaction of seeing these is to wonder whether a mistake has been made – and this is compounded by the fact that the appearance isn’t referred to in the usually obsessively complete ‘making-of’ series Doctor Who Confidential. But this tricksy narrative ploy can’t compare to the absorbing shock that must have been experienced watching those early episodes.

The DVDs and the modern series give a false impression of how Doctor Who should be watched. The act of cleaning, refining, explaining, while satisfying the interests of fans, actually runs the risk of losing that which made the series so great on first viewing. The monochromatic quality of the episodes of the 1960s is now seen as a sign of archive, or even authenticity, but it should instead be seen as part of how the series played to the strengths of its own primitivism and the primitivism of the television viewing technology of the time.

Perhaps, ironically, the best way to watch 1960s is on an iPod – where the screen is tiny. But try and watch it without any preconceptions – and one episode a week. Maybe only this way will we understand how the series, quite literally, haunted a generation of viewers.