The first episode of Doctor Who aired on BBC TV on 23 November 1963. To mark the 60th anniversary, the British Film Institute is running a season of events, lectures and screenings from 16 October to 28 November dedicated to the wild, whimsical and delightfully convoluted world of time travel.
The BFI’s ‘Destination Time Travel: Playing with Time in Film and TV’ season will explore the on-screen history of time travel, from The Time Machine to Doctor Who, alongside screenings of the Back to the Future trilogy and the first two instalments of the Terminator franchise.
It’s easy to see the bridge that links H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel The Time Machine to the BBC’s legendary Doctor Who series which started nearly 70 years later – there are striking similarities between these stories of an English gentlemen and a very British alien travelling through space and time in their amazing machines to have strange encounters with Morlocks and Daleks. But two decades after audiences were introduced to William Hartnell as the Doctor with his wondrous police box, the cultural image of time travel was usurped by a teenage skateboarder in a decked-out DeLorean and a cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Fortunately for time travel enthusiasts who might struggle to reconcile how these vastly divergent works can be considered part of the same storytelling tradition, Destination Time Travel is your essential guide to the fantastical genre. Spitting Image voice artist and author of the time-bending THE SWIDGERS book series Steve Nallon has joined forces with BFI archivist Dick Fiddy to document this spiralling chronology in a vast exploration of the tradition in literature, film and TV.
The duo dive into the tropes, stories and characters not only of the previously mentioned classics, but modern works of the genre, too, picking apart the common motifs that resonate across the genre and revealing the fundamental components of what defines time- travel fiction in the cultural imagination.
‘Telling the Tales of Time’, part of the BFI’s ‘Destination Time Travel: Playing with Time in Film and TV’ season, Friday 27 October, 6.15pm, BFI Southbank. Info and tickets here.
Destination Time Travel is out on October 23. Buy here.
