credit: Jeff Cioletti
In the four-part serial, “The Three Doctors”—the first story in which the Doctor teams with his former selves—the first Doctor (played by William Hartnell), in one of his very few scenes, dubs his two future incarnations “a dandy and a clown.” The third Doctor is the former, a trait he shares in some respects with James Bond. Doctor number one was referring to the third Doctor’s manner of dress: the velvet jacket, the frilly shirt, the black dress pants, and cape with purple lining. He’d often wear a bow tie as well.
Bond was known for his impeccable style as well, from the signature tux to the tailored suits. But where the iconic MI6 agent’s and the third Doctor’s high-class tastes really overlapped was in their respective eating and drinking habits. Pertwee’s version of the Time Lord and 007 both fancied themselves connoisseurs. (See Chapter 9 for in-depth details on the latter’s habits.)
In the classic 1972 story, “The Day of the Daleks,” the Doctor and companion Jo Grant indulge in some of the contents of diplomat Sir Reginald Styles’s wine cellar while they’re house-sitting after an assassination attempt by guerillas from two hundred years in the future. When the Doctor is done rhapsodizing about the quality of gorgonzola cheese that Styles keeps on hand, he dives into a glass of red wine. And, not only does he drink it, he offers his own Doctor-ish tasting notes: “a most good-humored wine—a touch sardonic, perhaps, but not cynical. Yes, a most civilized wine, one after my own heart.” (The description could very well apply to James Bond, as well, though I would say 007 has a touch more cynicism.) It’s enough for Jo to observe that the Doctor is “carrying on like a one-man food and wine society.”
For all intents and purposes, Pertwee’s third Doctor is the first real drinker among the early incarnations. Doctor number one flat-out lied two times when offered a drink in the Old West—Tombstone, to be exact, of OK Corral fame in the 1966 story “The Gunfighters.” The Doctor (with companions Steven and Dodo) arrived in 1881 Arizona Territory with a monster of a toothache. Of course, Tombstone was home to a very famous dentist, one Doc “I’m Your Huckleberry” Holliday. When the first Doctor enlisted Holliday’s services, the Time Lord was hoping for an anesthetic. This being a good quarter century before the invention of novocaine, all that the dentist and gunslinger had to offer was a slug of “rattlesnake oil” (most likely whiskey) but Doctor number one was adamant about not letting booze touch his time-traveling lips.
Later in the same serial, he reiterated his dry commitment when offered a drink in a saloon, noting that he’d be fine with just a glass of milk. (It’s no wonder “The Gunfighters” was long regarded as the worst story in the history of the long-running series.)
A year earlier—well, technically eight hundred and fifteen years earlier in the historical timeline—the Doctor rather enjoyed drinking mead at the Battle of Hastings in the serial, “The Time Meddler.” The first Doctor didn’t abstain when offered Madeira in “The Smugglers,” but he did turn down brandy, which leads me to believe that it’s not so much alcohol that Hartnell’s incarnation detests, but distilled spirits (despite the fact that Madeira is often fortified with brandy).
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Doctor’s anti-drinking stance came from Hartnell himself. He always viewed Doctor Who as a children’s show rather than a “family” show. There’s a distinction. Adults are bored out of their skulls watching children’s shows. But they enjoy family shows as much as their kids do, if not more so. The actor often was reportedly at odds with the production team any time the show got too scary for the kiddies. (Once those genies known as the Daleks were out of their bottles, there was no going back.) Hartnell’s declining health—which often manifested on-screen with botched lines—has been put forth as the primary reason the actor vacated the role, but the narrative direction of the series also played at least some small part in his departure.
Of course, when a Doctor regenerates, their personality changes considerably. Hartnell’s Doctor was a crotchety old bastard and it was probably best that we never got to see him inebriated. On the other hand, it may have made him lighten up a bit.
All future incarnations, save for number six and number twelve, were far less cranky than number one. Regeneration mellowed the Doctor considerably. Doctor number nine, played by actor Christopher Eccleston, might seem to be a rough-around-the-edges Manchester football hooligan on the outside, but he does seem to share his third incarnation’s penchant for elegant adult beverages. In “World War III,” the second of the two-part Slitheen invasion story in the first season of the freshly rebooted series, the Doctor, his companion Rose Tyler, and future Prime Minster Harriet Jones pour themselves glasses of what looks like either port, sherry, or brandy (hi-def was barely a thing when that episode came out) from a decanter sitting at the center of a conference table at 10 Downing Street. Moments earlier, the Doctor threatened to ignite the booze with his sonic screwdriver and use it as a weapon against the Slitheen. Once they were safe inside the fortified walls of the British government’s situation room—and just after they listened on the phone to Jackie Tyler (Rose’s mother) and Mickey Smith (Rose’s beau) blow up a Slitheen in the kitchen—the trio took a moment for a celebratory toast.
It was quite a familiar setting for the Doctor. Hours earlier, in the preceding episode, “Aliens of London,” number nine noted that a former Prime Minister drank him under the table. (Is the Doctor a lightweight?)
Once the Doctor and crew defeated the Slitheen, Jackie was eager to have over for tea the man who whisked her daughter across galaxies and millennia. Jackie noted that she had a bottle of Amaretto on hand and asked whether the Doctor was a drinker. Rose answered in the affirmative. I’m pretty sure the conference room wasn’t the first time she saw him imbibe.
We’ve even seen the Doctor drunk. In the episode with the tenth Doctor, “The Girl in the Fireplace,” the Time Lord staggers home from a soiree in eighteenth century Paris and claims to have accidentally invented the banana daiquiri hundreds of years too early. And this is why number ten remains my favorite.
A few years later, the eleventh Doctor gets a call from a nursing home, notifying him that Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart has passed away. The character never made a proper reappearance on the revived series—his last on-screen appearance was in the 1989 story, “Battlefield”—though he did guest star on the Doctor Who spinoff, The Sarah Jane Adventures.
The nurse on the other end of the line told the Doctor that the Brigadier “always made us pour an extra brandy in case you came ‘round one of these days.” (His actor, Nicholas Courtney, was quite the bon vivant. In 2001, I interviewed him for my documentary, Chronotrip, and I made sure to include a shot of his handler bringing him a drink from the hotel bar once the interview was done).
We do learn in one of the Doctor’s much later incarnations—the unapologetically Scottish one—that the Time Lord hides a bottle or two of booze behind one of the “round things” in the TARDIS.
In Peter Capaldi’s final outing, “Twice Upon a Time,” we get one of the strangest multi-Doctor episodes to date. Number twelve, in the prolonged throes of regeneration, bumps into number one (William Hartnell), also in the throes of his own prolonged regeneration into Patrick Troughton. Wait, you say. Didn’t William Hartnell die in 1975? And didn’t Richard Hurndall, who stepped in for Hartnell for “The Five Doctors” in 1983, pass away less than a year after that?
Then-showrunner Steven Moffat’s solution to that conundrum was a genius move. He rehired David Bradley (best known as Argus Filch in the Harry Potter flicks and Walder Frey on Game of Thrones), who had played William Hartnell four years earlier in An Adventure in Time & Space, the docudrama that chronicled the creation and early years of Doctor Who. (So, I would argue that Bradley has an even greater claim to the role than Hurndall did).
There’s a scene when Doctors one
