Watching reruns of old TV shows today is common, but when did shows first start being "rerun"? I've read that the pilot episode of Dr. Who was the first show to be rerun because it aired on Nov. 23, 1963 - the day after JFK's assassination. Is this true?

The first episode of Doctor Who, The Unearthly Child, was indeed first broadcast on November 23rd, 1963, and was watched by 4.4 million people. Rebroadcast on November 30th, immediately before the second episode of the series (The Cave Of Skulls), it was watched by 6.0 million people. There were a couple of reasons for this: firstly, there's the issue of the Kennedy assassination. Secondly, there was a widespread failure of power across a large swathe of Britain during the broadcast, and because Doctor Who had been widely promoted by the BBC - it was almost the cover story in the Radio Times - it was re-broadcast.

I very much doubt it was the first rerun in television history - the BBC was a peculiar institution with some very different prerogatives to commercial American television, and was often behind the times in how it operated. I suspect that An Unearthly Child wasn't even the first rerun on the BBC - where did you read that? In any case, neither Elizabeth Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum: An Unofficial Critical History Of Doctor Who Volume 1: William Hartnell, Tat Wood & Lawrence Miles' About Time: The Unauthorized Guide To Doctor Who: 1963-1966, or David J Howe, Mark Stammers, & Stephen James Walker's Doctor Who: The Handbook: The First Doctor mentions the factoid of the repeat being the first rerun ever, though they all mention that the BBC did rerun the program. A look at the BBC schedule from the night before shows that the BBC was playing *The Mary Tyler Moore Show; it's more likely, I suspect, that the first rerun was a rebroadcast of American content like Mary Tyler Moore. And with power outages probably being reasonably common, it's perhaps likely that other programs that were unable to be seen might also have been rebroadcast previously.

However, it is the case that Doctor Who was a relatively early example of a BBC series that was filmed onto videotape before the broadcast. Put it this way, the Quatermass science-fiction series often seen as a big influence on Doctor Who (with The Quatermass Experiment broadcast in 1953, Quatermass II broadcast in 1955, and Quatermass And The Pit broadcast at the turn of 1958 into 1959) were actually broadcast live, as a sort of television play, with the exception of some pre-recorded scenes used as cutaways, so that the actors could get into their positions for the next scene.

The BBC, in the late 1950s, still lived with a mindset that television was simply a recording of a live performance, rather than a carefully edited artifact. In fact, the only reason that recordings of the second two Quatermass serials exist is that the BBC deliberately taped the live broadcast, because they thought they might be able to sell the recordings to Canada to be shown on Canadian television - they didn't intend to rebroadcast the show themselves. It wasn't until 1963, in fact, that the BBC actually found a way to edit videotape recordings - unless you recorded on film, rather than tape (see this Monty Python sketch for a humorous look at the difference between what film and videotape looks like), a tape recording was basically broadcast unedited. If there was a big mistake in the filming, actors would shout an obscenity that could not be broadcast, and the tape would be wiped and the filming started from scratch.

I've heard rumours that the fourth serial in the original Doctor Who series, Marco Polo, a missing episode, has actually been recovered, but is unable to be released on DVD because the BBC, at the time, simply did not put any language about reruns or future releases into acting contracts. This was simply that television programs were expected to be broadcast once, and once only - thus keeping a lot of actors in work! One of the actors in the Marco Polo serial (or their estate) goes the rumour, is asking for exorbitant amounts of money to allow a release on DVD, and so it remains unreleased. Whether this is true or not is one thing, but it is plausible given the way that the BBC operated at the time - they simply did not think of what they broadcast as an artform in of itself; it was simply a recording of a performance. If they wanted to replay it, they could simply get the actors to perform it again. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the actors unions in the UK - which were more powerful than those in the US - hated the idea of reruns, because the rerun replaced actual work for an actor.

Doctor Who, with its needs as a science fiction program, was at the vanguard of this transformation of the idea of a television program being a recording of a performance into it being a product in of itself which could not simply be performed at your local theatre. Because this transformation occurred in concert with the rise of British rock'n'roll and the rise of the record as not just a performance but an artifact in itself - The Beatles appear in a 1965 episode of Doctor Who, The Chase, playing 'Ticket To Ride' - Elizabeth Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum often sees Doctor Who's advances in television production as curiously parallel to the various advances in music production through the 1960s.

Anyway, apart from the rerun of An Unearthly Child, Doctor Who was not rerun on the BBC until the 1970s, which was not coincidentally when they began broadcasting episodes in colour (the first of which was the serial The Spearhead From Space, which introduced Jon Pertwee, and which clearly did much to inspire Rose, the first episode of the new series). This appears to be about the time when Doctor Who started to be routinely rerun on the BBC. Because the black and white episodes of the TV show were now decidedly old hat, the third rebroadcast of The Unearthly Child had to wait until 1981, as part of a series of tasters leading into the first series with Peter Davison as the Doctor.