Name: William Hartnell: The Original
Genre: Documentary, Short, Biography
Released: 2013-11-21
Duration: 5 min
Rating: 8.3
Cast: David Bradley, Jessica Carney, Peter Davison

Offers very little even to the casual viewer in a rush

William Hartnell was an actor; he played Doctor Who in season 1; Doctor Who turned out to be quite the hit; then Hartnell died; the end. This is a plot summary of the 6 minute film which we have here posing as a documentary and to be fair you probably only get a bit more from the film than that sentence. A lot of this short seems to have been produced around the same sort of time as the film An Adventure Through Space & Time was made, since it spends as long with the cast and sets of that film as it does with anything else.

There are interviews with a family member, co-stars and others, but these are not new; I cannot be sure where I have seen them before (maybe in the film) but I know I have seen them before. This does rather leave me wondering why this short was made, because it really offers very little and I can only imagine a very busy New Who fan, who only has a few minutes to spare, might impatiently watch this during a ride on the Tube, as opposed to watching the original work or the film. Even then I doubt it offers much more than I have described. Technically it is well made since it takes bits from the film so it has high production values but just almost nothing of substance. A pretty pointless short if you have seen any of Hartnell's episodes or the film dramatizing their making – even for the causal viewer in a total rush there is not much on offer here.

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