Day Of The Daleks: Ranking - 73

 

 Day Of the Daleks

(Season 9, Dr 3 with Jo and UNIT, 1-22/1/1972, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Louis Marx, director: Paul Bernard)  

Rank: 73

'Hello younger me, I've time-travelled from the future to tell you not to write this review...yet. You see there's a reference to it in series 32 in 2037 that’s going to cause havoc with the time streams and besides, with all the new stories out by then you'll only end up crashing the internet if you keep writing this much for every story so keep it short. There's an episode where Boris Johnson actually turns into a Slitheen and everything. Cheerie-bye!'
 
'Hello, it's me again, even older me this time. Was middle me here again? I just popped along to say take no notice of what I said, it turns out that due to a glitch on the BBC i-player where they tried to update all the special effects – again! - all the copies of 'Day Of The Daleks' out on DVD fell through a wormhole so now all that's left is the soundtrack. Given that no one can see it and all we have are memories you need to make this review super-long! It's been hailed as a classic now people can't see how few Daleks there are and they're planning an animation for it, which has pushed this story up the rankings by at least 12 places! Oh and in this timeline the Abzorbaloff's back - only this time he's Donald Trump in disguise! See ya round!'
 
'Hi me, it's me again. It's another year on and the animation of 'Day Of The Daleks' replacement has just come out. It's wretched. So now the story has tumbled down the rankings to where you had it and at the length you had it anyway, sorry, you might as well have left it alone. Oh and guess what? NATO turn out to have sold our souls in return for the Dalek's taranium core in a remake of 'The Daleks' Masterplan'. Toodlepip!'   

  

  

For a series that revolves so much around time travel it’s surprising how few Dr Who stories really use it as a plot device – till Steven Moffat came along in the 21st century anyway. ‘Day Of The Daleks’ is, I would say, the cleverest use of time travel in the ‘old’ series, a plot that’s like ‘Back To The Future’ (but twelveish years early) if you squint a lot and substitute the Doctor trying to negotiate human guerrillas fighting some Daleks for Marty McFly getting his parents back together so he can be born. It’s an atmospheric story this one, about the implications of meddling and while many Dr Who stories have a re-set button, of putting all the toys back in the toybox by the end without too many changes so you can watch stories in any order, this one is entirely about that very question and the battle to have ‘our’ timelines restored by the end of part four so we don’t wake up next week to a Dalek invasion. ‘Day Of The Daleks’ is an unusual story for this most cosy, perhaps even predictable of eras in that it keeps changing direction every few seconds. It starts off seeming as if it’s going to be a supernatural ghost story, turns into a political thriller partway through, has a frisson with being pure time-related scifi and ends up as dirty and dangerous as 1970s Who ever got, full of fights to the death and mad explosions. What fans probably lose today compared to 1972 is that it’s a story that also constantly teases us who the ‘big bad’ might be behind everything: yes the Daleks are in the title so that part’s not much of a giveaway, but it feels for the longest time as if there’s a shadowy presence even behind them thwarting them at every turn and using them as puppets to destroy the earth. If you’d come to this direct from the previous season then you’re sure what’s going on: after six straight appearances in a row clearly The Master’s going to pop up in this story any scene now…surely now…now?...The ending when it comes (spoilers) is super clever and very poetic ad isn’t really about a monster at all but mankind himself. 

 Writer Louis Marx (surely the fourth Marx Brother, following Groucho Chico and Harpo. Named Skaro maybe?) presents the middle of his three scripts for Dr Who and were there ever a more varied trilogy in the series? This story is a complex tangled web full of counter-arguments and philosophy, very unlike the straightforward visuals of ‘Planet Of The Giants’ or the (relatively) straightforward Renaissance-set ‘masque Of Mandragora’. Like ‘Back To the Future’ it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. Only unlike ‘Back To The Future’ there are much bigger things at stake than whether Marty can be born: by the end everything. Every last bit of civilisation and everyone whose alive or hasn’t been born yet depend on the Doctor getting through to one lone assassin whose so dedicated to his cause he’s prepared to die for it (and my loyalties are particularly divided given that it’s Jimmy Winston, keyboard player with one of my favourite bands ‘The Small Faces’). Fittingly, then, this is a game of itchycoo with Tin Soldiers and Daleks played out in a park on what should have been a Lazy Sunday afternoon where the stakes are all or nothing. Though for now there’s no Sha La La La John Leeson. What’s the doctor gonna do ‘bout it then? 

Well, actually, refreshingly for the sometimes know-it-all third Doctor he gets most of it wrong and might have been better off not doing anything. This is a story where everyone’s perceptions are wrong and where a desperate move at the wrong time without the full information can lead to the creation of the very thing you’re trying to avoid, which is a neat twist on the usual ‘take action to overthrow the things you don’t like’ message Dr Who usually has. ‘Day’ substitutes the usual UNIT HQ for Auderly House, a stately home where a peace conference is taking place – the 3rd Dr seems more at home here than anywhere else we see him during his exile on Earth, happily imbibing on all the fancy luxuries of cheese and wine as he camps out in the office of Reginald Styles, a leading diplomat who keeps reporting ghosts. Everyone thinks the great man’s been having a bit too much fun in his wine cellar, but the Doctor knows something is up. However the ‘ghosts’ turn out to be terrorists from the future who see this point in time as the day that creates the horrors of the world they live in and its a mad dystopia, where the world has broken out into a war and everything has gone wrong (in our universe I see it as the day David Cameron takes over as prime minister and started cutting funding to all the things we actually need and causing the Brexit referendum vote out of ego to prove the electorate loved him – when it became quite clear they didn’t). The guerrillas naturally see the Doctor, in this fancy luxurious mansion and assume he’s the cause of their downfall, a reflection of every cosy self-centred thing they hate – but of course the Doctor is really on their side, especially when it turns out (not really a spoiler because they’re in the title – again!) This isn’t a Dalek plan at all: they’ve  Daleks have just been exploiting the situation for their own gain, which is what happens when two sides won’t play nicely, a bigger third will come along and steal everything for themselves.

The real ‘baddy’ is time and this is the first script that treats the fourth dimension as another character since ‘The Time Meddler’, something that has a real impact on the plot rather than just something the Tardis travels through. Of all the scripts in the ‘old’ series that touch on how the past, present and future are interconnected and the repercussions for how our behaviour now affects people later, but this is one of the most blatant. The Doctor is desperate to tread carefully, because he knows that this is a sticky point in time where the future can be shaped, rather than a fixed point like so much of the past he visits. This is a universe where people who aren’t even born yet can curse you for the mistakes you made now, sure that the future seemed inevitable and concrete when really, for you, everything is still up in the air and you’re having to make decisions in a hurry. Like the wine and cheese the Doctor knocks back there’s a price for everything in the morning and enjoyment the night before might result in a hangover or weird dreams afterwards – that’s certainly what the guerrillas think. Only the people who think they got the worst of it because of something you did are angry that you had all the enjoyment and they had the headache. If Dr who is, as we’ve mentioned a few times, an ongoing discussion between parents and children then this is the history lesson: don’t judge your parents who fought in the war (any war but for this generation particularly WW2) too harshly kids, because they might only be suffering the results of what their grandparents did and their parents before that. This is also the story that invents the ‘blinovitch limitation effect’, Terrance Dicks’ last-minute addition to the script after Barry Letts asked him why time-travelling guerrillas couldn’t just keep going back in time to put things right if they wanted to (a few later stories use it too, notably ‘Father’s Day’, where it’s effectively the entire plot). 

And as ever when WW2 gets mentioned and the need the Daleks turn up. This is unusual behaviour for them though – they’re passive recipients of the Humans messing up rather than the active force we (and the Doctor) assume they are for most of the story. All they’ve done is turned up, noticed the humans in chaos and gone ‘nice planet – we’ll take it. Oh and look at all these lovely resources we need for our empire: thanks mankind’. They probably couldn’t believe their luck: all those years they’ve been trying to invade and the Doctor keeps defeating them and now they’ve had a clear run with nothing to stop them at all (it’s never mentioned what happened to UNIT in this timeline by the way and why they aren’t keeping order. Did they all die protecting Auderly House? Were they overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people suffering? Did the UNIT troops stop turning up for work when the paycheques bounced? Is the Brigadier standing alone in a field trying to turn back the hordes?!) The story would actually work as well if not better without the Daleks in this story and indeed the first draft of this story (named ‘The Time warriors’ like a later Robert holmes script, confusingly) that Marx submitted didn’t have them in at all. Originally this story was a showdown between the guerrillas and the gorilla-like Ogrons in a plot that seems more like ‘Planet Of The Apes (a hit in 1968 and it’s a surprise Who hadn’t had a go at a story of its own yet, after all the sentient animals down the years). The Daleks’ latest grunts, to replace the robomen of stories old and do all the human physical things the hand-less Daleks couldn’t do, were originally the stars and a bit smarter (though not too much, given that their name is derived from ‘ogre’). The time element is still the central focus, but this time it’s specifically a nuclear war that everyone is trying to solve with the Ogrons as a military police that have arrived to fill the vacuum when chaos falls. 

 It was Terrance Dicks who asked the writer to give the Daleks to make their first comeback to the series in five years – and their first in colour (give or take the Peter Cushing films). By most accounts he wasn’t very happy about it: Dicks and Barry Letts had both gone on the record when they took over the show in 1970 as saying that the Daleks needed a rest and wouldn’t be brought back for a blatant ratings grab. Only Huw Wheldon, director general, still measures the series’ success by how many people are writing about it and his mother-in-law is still obsessed with Daleks. Wearily the pair agreed to put them in a story and Letts’ old writing parter Robert Sloman is hard at putting them in the series finale – only it’s a story that’s having problems (it will end up as ‘The Time Monster’ with The master a better fit all round for what the Daleks were meant to be doing).Such ripples, cause and effect in action! So Barry and Terrance decide to add the Daleks to an existing script and make that one the exciting start to the new season – only they’re not sure what script to add them to. Honestly, though , I’m surprised they didn’t add the Daleks to the Peladon script (where the Doctor’s prejudice against them makes even more sense than against the Ice Warriors) or ‘The Mutants’ (a script all about evolution which seems tailor made for a race that were genetically manipulated: the contrast of the Kaleds turning evil and nasty inside metal casings with the mutts who turn into spiritual butterflies would have been delicious and just the lift that story needed). In the end they chose Marx’s simply because he was the least experienced writer (and therefore the easiest to push around without grumbling – which he did anyway). The production team also managed to annoy Terry Nation because they hadn’t read his contract which stipulated he got first refusal on all Dalek stories and they couldn’t be used without his permission. Getting wind that they were being used without his permission he got in contact and it looked for a time as if the story might have to be re-written again, only for Nation (who’d struggled and failed to make a splash in Americas and was looking to come back to England and the BBC) was pacified with a free lunch, the chance to amend the scripts and a commission to write ‘Planet Of The Daleks’ the following year. As it happens he didn’t amend too much - just some stray bits of dialogue he thought were too ‘talky’ for Daleks – and far from what some guidebooks say called Marx’s scripts ‘a very good and exciting set of episodes’. 

 Marx’s script is certainly very different to his own style, which is much more lot-driven and action-orientated. This a plot that thinks deep thoughts, which is why the Daleks’ usual bluster feel so out of place. It’s the Dalek parts of this story that feel most like a let-down: being so last minute there hasn’t been time to make any models and not many had survived in a workable condition (no surprise really given how old the props were and how tight the budget was) so all the team have are three very battered looking cases, the most substantial of which has been painted gold to make the most of being in colour. It’s the smallest amount of Daleks we’ve had in a story yet (even the debut story had four!) just when they need to be a whole army. There’s a scene at the end when the fate of the world depends on UNIT troops battling three Daleks and four Ogrons: not the scariest army there’s ever been (although the scene’s not as bad as fans often make out: I hadn’t noticed for years thanks to clever angles. And the ‘improved’ version for the DVD and Blu-ray, that throws in some mirror effects to add more Daleks and lots of smoke, is worse making the Daleks seem comical as they wave their plungers in synch with one another). There are actually more Daleks on the VHS cover than there are in the story! Asking them to roll across rough terrain, swaying from side to side, is also a big ask: this is the first time the Daleks have been outside the studio set, bar a quick holiday in London, and it rather scuppers their plan of taking over the earth if they can’t even visit it without looking as if their heads are about to fall off. You would think they’d have at least painted them the bright colours that worked so well in the two Peter Cushing films rather than the off-colour metal that worked so well when shot in monochrome (apparently dalekanium doesn’t come in bright colours, which is a shame).Worse are the voices: after five years there was nobody working on the series who’d been around when the Daleks were being done last time so, while they knew to use a ring modulator, they hadn’t got the frequencies right, which is why the Daleks sound as if they’ve got a heavy cold. They also don’t bother to get the usual voices in and Oliver Gilbert and Peter Massaline sound like the sort of lovely friendly sweet chaps you’d love to talk to over dinner, not the most ruthless merciless killers in the universe (this is an affect the DVD/Blu-ray does put right, a little). 

Understandably Marx hasn’t spent a lot of time explaining how these are the most frightening species in the series, because they’re a last minute cut and paste job and he’s already had to take out too much of his first script to fit them in. So the Daleks are something they’d never been till now: a letdown, an extra in their own show, not scheming tyrants but generic monsters. At this point, after five years away and their last story being heralded classic ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ fans expected more and a whole group of fans had started watching the series since 1967, brought u on Target novelisations and the memories of their elder siblings and parents who remembered the Daleks being properly scary loike. The previous season had ended with the Devil (‘The Daemons’). By contrast this lot seemed about on a par with the fake robot in ‘Colony In Space’. Amazingly things get worse in the next two Dalek stories (despite both being written by their creator) before things finally get better. At least after two experimental 2nd Dr stories where David Whittaker made them pretend to be human and then turn them part human this time they’re all Dalek. Weird, though, that they should be added to another script at such a late stage rather than having a story written around them and one that doesn’t exactly play to their strengths (we’ve seen Daleks time travel before of course but it’s not an obvious part of their arsenal). 

The story still doesn’t ‘need’ them – if anything the threat works better as an existential threat noises off rather than having to create dystopia in a BBC car park. That aside, however, the locations are actually rather good: it was quite a coup getting Dropmore House in Burnham as the estate where the peace conference is taking place and as far as I know this lush 19th century building never appeared in any other TV or film. It’s one time owner was Lord Grenvile, who as prime minister passed the law abolishing the slave trade in Britain, so you sense he would have approved of a script where the Ogrons and Humans alike are being treated as slaves. Seeing a Dalek opening French windows with a sucker arm is one of those shots of the extraordinary hitting the ordinary head-on that Dr Who does so well and which no series can touch. Brentford Towers meanwhile, is the rough and ready council estate the guerrillas fight against. The contrast between the two is what really makes this story: ‘our’ world feels impossibly lush and opulent, full of luxuries that men who only talk about war and don’t have to face it everyday can sit on and debate for eternity while their minions face hardship all the time. Watching the guerrillas arriving at the house, from their own bare concrete monstrosity you can see why they would be so angry and let down at ‘our’ era. And the era of 1972, don’t forget, has Richard Nixon in power in America and even before the Watergate scandal becomes known he’s already seen as being les trustworthy than any of his predecessors: trust between the public and governments in general were at an all time low in this era, especially the rich (even so this is bravely early for the Doctor to snap ‘try and use your intelligence, man, even if you are a politician!’) This story is Dr Who’s take on the class wars too, the working class canon fodder sent to fight rich men’s wars. These are people who have nothing and are at risk of even that being taken away – of course they’re going to look on Styles and his kind as traitors: they have no idea of the hardships. Even the Doctor is kidnapped because a man in a cellar enjoying creature comforts surely can’t understand war the way the guerrillas can. There are also lots of scenes with Jo contrasted with female guerrilla Anat: both are roughly the same age but have had very different lives, on cynical and tough and one still sweet and innocent (we know Jo’s uncle is posh even if she isn’t!) 

There’s a sequence, too, towards the end where the Dalek plan seems to be turning the earth into one big factory, lording it about on the surface while their slaves do all the hard work. The real divide, then, is between haves and have-nots, the people who exploit others and are oblivious to the consequences of their actions and the jealousy it causes. Even our heroes aren’t immune: all that stuff in episode one where Benton is trying to have an nibble of cheese before his superior officer Yates comes along, tells him off eating on duty and scoff the lot himself, quoting ‘rank has it’s privileges’ was the last scene written for the story when it was found to be under-running and while most fans see it as harmless filler, to me it’s Marx going back and seeing what the theme of his script really is: the abuse of power, even in a slight and jokey way. More than a war between countries this feels like a war between class (just look at how many northern accents there are in the guerrillas compared to the diplomats) – only of course that mega twist shows that it’s all for nothing, that despite appearances Styles and the guerrillas really do want the same thing: peace. It’s a neat twist on the usual Dr Who idea of prejudice and how both sides are scared by the other because they don’t understand the bigger picture. This bit, too, works well with the Daleks: WW2 happened as a direct consequence of the hardships Germany suffered in the 1st World War (both by their own hand, by bombing raids and by paying compensation to the victors): fittingly for a species who were always equated with Nazis this story is how someone like Hitler or the Daleks can exploit poverty and turn that hatred against other people. Similarly, too, the second World war could have been stopped early if countries weren’t so scarred by fighting they hadn’t appeased Hitler. The anger the guerrillas feel is akin to how the soldiers at the front felt about Neville Chamberlain signing a treaty with Hitler he never planned to keep, the promise of ‘peace in our time’ ironically an excuse to look the other and let war become inevitable. 

 This isn’t the whimsical Dr Who of the colourful looking yet black-and-white thinking of the Peter Cushing films then, the last time most people at home would have seen the Daleks (at their TV premiere in the middle of ‘Colony In Space’) – this one is a more grey battle between good and evil, only for three episodes you’re left kind of guessing which side is which. Even the Dr looks a bit dodgy when seen through the guerrilla’s eyes and assumed to be Reginald Styles and it takes some convincing to prove to them that he’s a goodie himself. It’s a wonderfully ambiguous script that’s always chopping and changing, moving your sympathies this way and that which makes it stand out in an era when there was a bigger gap than ever between heroes and villains. The great mega twist (which really does need a spoiler here) is that the guerrillas end up causing the very event they were trying to prevent, condemning themselves to years of suffering precisely because they messed up the peace conference that, before the timelines got changes, would have saved them. It’s a fascinating point, especially when seen on first transmission against the backdrop of the cold war: what if one of the sides tries to do something out of peace and ends up accidentally escalating tensions and melting the cold war into a hot one? 

The year 1972 was full of peace conferences forever taking place at some summit or another, with both sides crowing in the media the next day about how they got the best out of every deal instead of genuinely trying to come to things as equal partners; one wrong move, even by accident, and we too could end up in the destroyed and devastated Earth the kidnapped Dr is taken to. Peace conferences tend to be seen as very passive things, something happens when the fighting ends, but this is a story that all but screams that peace is something to actively pursue, not something to fall into as a last resort. This is a story where everyone - except the Daleks – want peace, but somewhere the wires got crossed so everyone is fighting everyone else for the same means instead of working together. And as per usual, despite being set in the future, it’s bang on target for what’s happening in the outside world. By now the cold war has moved on from America and Russia both using other countries for bribery and pretend coups to uneasy peace talks, diplomats from two opposing regimes sitting round a tale and glaring at one another, blaming each other for their problems. The fact is, though, that both sides just want the stability and prosperity they think the other possesses and had they realised their similar needs were more important than their differences the cold war might have ended a lot sooner. There’s also a huge debate in the English press about whether Irish ‘terrorists’ should be allowed to peace conferences after fighting for independence (even though peace is all they’re after too, with the IRA more obviously the guerrillas with nothing to lose and the British army the unfeeling Daleks putting them in their place). Marx himself says he was inspired by tales of guerrilla fighting in the Israeli-Egyptian war and trying to work out whose side he was on (one of the real guerrillas, that Anat is clearly based on, is a charismatic freedom fighter named Leila, who also inspires Chris Boucher to write companion Leela in five years’ time although Anat, is anything, more savage.Note too how the guerrillas in this story all have middle Eastern names). Suffice to say there were a lot of peace conferences for different disputes in this era. Notably we never find out what conflict the peace conference is solving as if that’s a detail that doesn’t really matter (although Chinese embassies are mentioned): it almost doesn’t matter – this is every conflict humans have ever had, when people who hate each other’s guts have to come together and pretend to like each other for the cameras in the hope of a compromise. You can just imagine the writer turning on the news for ideas and being struck by how much the news seems to be repeating itself, how things seem to keep going round in round in circles wit nothing ever getting done. The title ‘day’ of course is meant ironically; there is no single day when a decades-long, sometimes lifelong grudge, comes to an end just because a piece of paper says it. The best thing we can do is learn to rub shoulders together and agree on out differences. 

 A script that subtle needs a good cast to make the most of it and thankfully this story has a great one. Few people watching would have realised that the moustacheod desperado Shurra was played an original member of dapper mod band The Small Faces (those of you who’ve come to this one from my other twitter threads/blogs might be pleased/shocked to learn that this story is the only time a musician from one of the bands I write about appeared in a Dr Who story as an actor (though Mick Jagger’s house turns up in a couple of stories). Yes, Jimmy Winston was the original keyboard player for The Small Faces before Ian McLagan joined, playing Shurra the ‘heavy’ of the guerrillas and he does a great job (he actually seems more comfortable in this world of rough and tumble politics in tatty battered clothes than he did as the only tall one in a mod band wearing three-piece suits). The other acting in this story is great too: Anna Barry is excellent as Shurra’s even gutsier female boss Anat and Scott Fredericks is brilliant as the more philosophical Boaz. All three feel desperate but in very different ways – even amongst this team there’s tension, an injured angry Shurra less patient than the more gentile Boaz with Anat caught in the middle. Jon Pertwee gets to be dashing, nicely balanced on the edge between prog and punk as he’s at home both eating cheese and supping wine and fighting in hand to hand combat in the dirt (after all, Pertwee was born into a posh acting family but also served time in the navy so knew this bruiser world firsthand) and he’s at his very best when everything seems against him in this story and he’s arguing for his life, as far out of his comfort zone as we ever see him in episode three (and as well within his comfort zone as we ever see him lounging around in episode one!) Katy Manning is at her best as Jo, loyal to her Dr whatever mad scheme he’s got her involved with this time but not above laughing at him too. Poor Sgt Benton gets the worst of being on guard but is still the warm and wonderfully human face of what in lesser shows would normally be a faceless group of soldiers. Then there’s Wilfred Carter as Sir Reginald Styles, - as much as he and the Dr wind each other up they’re really very similar, bearing the burden of responsibility and trying to get things right (he’s certainly a lot more believable and likeable than this era’s other bureaucrats and buffoons). Everyone in this story feels like a fully rounded character, doing what they think is right even when they get it wrong (give or take the Daleks) and that makes such a refreshing change after so many aliens invading the home counties because they’re ‘bad’. Even though the Daleks are in this story, after so many adventures in a row with The Master manipulating people to being on the brink of war on purpose, it makes a real change to have the humans head in there themselves, by accident. 

 The result is a story that feels as if it’s a lot bigger than just another Dalek story and one with scope much wider than a ‘day’, with events that affect all the tomorrows to come as well, a story that’s always shifting and changing so that you keep switching your allegiances at home as more and more information comes to light. Yes it’s a story that needs a bigger budget to do the script justice: given that this is the start of a new season everyone wants to begin with a bang it’s notable how ropey the costumes and sets and especially the props are in this story. The scene of the Daleks interrogating the Doctor famously re-uses the opening credits (you can see even see Pertwee’s name flash up on screen infinitesimally): as much as I’ve read reasons for this being that the Daleks are somehow using the temporal schism of time the Tardis travels through as part of their interrogation techniques you can’t help but feel that, actually, it was just the cheapest way of getting a load of pulsating lines. The story itself isn’t perfect by any means: it goes to sleep a little in the middle, courtesy of this era’s obsession with transport chases (the Honda tricycle seen in this story is one spotted by Pertwee and Letts when they bonded by visiting the London Motor Show soon after Jon was cast. The actor said they looked futuristic and were exactly the sort of thing they needed in the show and Barry wasn’t yet experienced enough to stop him). The result is the silliest chase sequence in Dr Who ever. And boy is that saying something! The ending too feels incredibly rushed (the original script had the Doctor and Jo going back to talk to their younger selves as we see them do in episode one but the director thought it was unnecessary and took it out – actually it’s very necessary setting up the idea of cause and effect. Terrance Dicks, who thought it one of the best scenes in the story, snuck it back in again in his novelisation. Intended last lines: Jo asking ‘Doctor, that future we went to with the Daleks ruling Earth. Is it going to happen or isn’t it?’ The Doctor replies: ‘Well it is – and it isn’t. There are all kinds of futures you know’, the hint being that it’s up to us to choose a good one instead of falling into a bad one through misunderstandings and prejudice). 

Mostly though ‘Day Of The Daleks’ is an excellent story that’s tense all the way through, without the usual bits of padding (largely!) and where the threat doesn’t let up for a moment, bigger and bolder with the usual DW/UNIT formula than normal and with the sort of twists that we come to think of as only happening I the modern series. Something told me Steven Moffat, twelve when this story went out and already making up Dr Who stories of his own, took particular note of this adventure which is so similar to his own work. Russell T Davies, too, seems to have taken note: this is the first time we ever get a news report given to us as if something in the story is ‘real’, with reporter Alex McIntosh playing himself (and unlike 21st century rules he’s not appearing on a TV watched by characters in case a viewer switches on partway through and thinks this is a news report, not a drama). A lot of future stories wouldn’t look the same without this one’s cause and effect, then and we owe it big time. Would that the 3rd Dr’s era had more days like these and that there had been more timey-wimey stories like this in the original run as it’s a brilliant use of Dr Who’s ever-elastic format – it’s just a shame that the budget isn’t elastic enough to match the script’s ambition. 

 POSITIVES +The contrast between the studio sets shot on videotape and the glossy locations shot on film is never better than in this story, but in another of this story’s twists they’re used in reverse. The studio set of a stately home’s interiors are lush, gorgeous, pompous – and even though its ‘our’ time period it all feels a bit false when cut against the ravaged world of the future, all Daleks in concrete tower blocks and wastelands. Shooting these location sequences on film makes even the car park seem vibrant and ‘real’, while the stately home set just looks ‘pretend’ and flimsy adding to the feeling of unease amongst the guerrillas that these idiots in ‘our’ time don’t have a clue what real life is all about. All this and punk’s year zero is still five years away! 

 NEGATIVES – The poor Ogrons, they really are a most unlucky race. The big threat of Marx’s original story were a bit brighter in that draft (OK, a lot brighter) and have been turned thicker and more brutish when they’re re-written to become the Daleks’ slave force and honestly they don’t need to be there in the final version (but their creator was too fond of them to give them the axe altogether. Besides, give an axe to an Ogron and he’d probably try to clean his teeth with it, they’re that kind of a race). The Daleks are super bright and have colossal power, so why do they bother taking over what must be the thickest race in Dr Who and using them purely as slave labour? In a story that’s about intellects facing off against one another the class thickos of DW just get in the way. The masks too are pretty ropey: they’re clearly meant to be ‘Planet Of the Apes’ but on a BBC budget that’s just asking for trouble. We don’t even get to see any shots of them riding the ‘hover bike’ (owner in real life: Jon Pertwee) which just happens to be left by one of them against a wall for the Doctor to conveniently steal – for that sight alone it would have been worth the comedy value (Ogrons aren’t exactly svelte!) 

BEST QUOTES: ‘There are many sorts of ghosts, Jo. Ghosts from the past – and ghosts from the future’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Missing In Action’ is one of the most moving Dr Who stories of all, dealing with the death of a UNIT soldier during the events of ‘Day Of The Daleks’ (he’s private David Edmunds, the one disintegrated by Daleks whose body disappears)…despite being a brief single-page story in the pages of Dr Who Magazine #205 (published 1993). The story is told from the point of view from Mike Yates who has been put in charge of contacting the soldier’s family to ask exactly what happened, only the official secrecy act means he can’t tell them about the peace conference at Auderly House and guerrillas and Daleks and the huge sacrifices his men make to keep the Earth safe. It’s kind of the ‘Lower decks’ of the Whoniverse dealing with the lives of the people you don’t often get to see and is long overdue a re-print, like so many of DWM’s ‘Brief Encounters’ prose works. 

 ‘Honest Living’ is much more of a direct sequel, part of ‘More Short Trips’ (1999) the second Anthology of short stories based on Dr Who. This is the 3rd Doctor story although he barely features in it – instead it’s Jo who takes the lead in a story where she’s abducted by Tuala, another guerrilla from the alternate timeline of ‘Day Of The Daleks’, much as the Doctor was in the story. The house they’re taken to is the one part of the timeline that hasn’t snapped back into place when the rest of the timeline was resolved (because…timey wimey). Jason Luborik’s short story feels more like a sub-plot that could have been in the story rather than a full tale in and of itself but he captures the feel of this story and the characters in it well and the idea of one of the regulars being trapped in a time that shouldn’t exist points the way to the Steven Moffat years of the show to come. 

 And finally our old friend ‘Time and Time Again’ (1993) is a comic strip from DWM that sees the 7th Doctor and Ace going back through some old timelines searching for items to do with the past, including – naturally enough given the nature of this story – ‘Day Of The Daleks’. Ace seizes the sword on the wall in Auderly House before the 3rd Doctor spots her and assumes she’s another ghost from the future. 

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