The BBC broadcast 'An Unearthly Child,' the debut episode of 'Doctor Who,' introducing William Hartnell as an alien Time Lord who travels through time and space in a police-box-shaped ship called the TARDIS. Overshadowed in the press by continuing coverage of Kennedy's assassination the day before, the modest children's serial nonetheless launched what would become the world's longest-running science fiction television series, still airing more than sixty years later.
The BBC had commissioned 'Doctor Who' as an educational children's program meant to dramatize historical and scientific ideas, and its budget reflected those modest ambitions: the TARDIS interior set cost almost nothing, and the title character's spaceship looked, deliberately, like an ordinary London police telephone box.
William Hartnell played the First Doctor as a prickly, secretive old man rather than the swashbuckling hero the role would later become, kidnapping two of his granddaughter's schoolteachers into the TARDIS in the very first episode. The broadcast's timing could hardly have been worse for publicity—British newspapers on November 23, 1963 were consumed with the previous day's assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, and the BBC re-ran the episode the following week to ensure it got a fair audience.
Despite the muted debut, the show found its footing within weeks, thanks partly to the introduction of the Daleks, pepper-pot-shaped alien mutants whose robotic cry of 'Exterminate!' entered British popular culture almost instantly. Doctor Who would go on to outlast its creators, be cancelled and revived, and become a genuine national institution, with the Doctor's regenerations offering a uniquely flexible format for eleven and counting different actors.