The Dalek Invasion Of Earth: Ranking - 32

 

The Dalek Invasion Of Earth

(Season 2, Dr 1 with Ian Barbara and Susan, 21/11/1964-26/12/1964, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: David Whittaker, writer: Terry Nation, director: Richard Martin)

Rank: 32

   'It's the Dalek invasion of Earth! Wait, no, the Daleks have only taken London. The Zygons got Glasgow, The Giant Maggots got Cardiff, The yeti got Tibet, The Cybermen got CyberManchester and The Voord got Ormskirk. The Ice Warriors were due to invade Carlisle but said it was too cold' 

Though held over and broadcast near the start of the second season, ‘Dalek Invasion’ was the last story to be filmed as part of the unbroken near-yearlong run of filming in Dr Who’s debut year and celebrates the show’s first birthday by doing all the things they said they wouldn’t ever do when they started: bring back an alien (The Daleks had been pretty comprehensively beaten at the end of their first appearance after all), return to near-contemporary London (this first series has been all about trying to get home rather than exploring or adventuring as per later, so this is the one time the series couldn’t do without ending) and lose a companion. For this first year more than any other year these Tardis travellers have been a team, covering for each other’s weaknesses and building on each other’s strengths and it feels like a proper loss, in a story that’s all about how grief makes you do funny things. Mostly though the change has been in the way the show is being made: Dr Who is no longer the runt of the BBC litter, a series that everyone assumed would only last a few months at best, but the corporation’s flagship programme which they’re even prepared to slash out a little money on (though not too much, obviously). This is the Christmas of Dalekmania, when there were Dalek jumpsuits, Dalek action toys, Dalek stationary and Dalek sweets all competing for shelf-space in shops (not quite the bonanza of choice of the 2000s maybe but, for the times, a veritable blitz) and the Skaro nasties’ much publicised return was one of the big TV events of the year (episodes 2 and 6 peaked at 12.4 million viewers, a figure that’s only ever beaten twice in the next fifteen years – one of them by the first episode of following story ‘The Rescue’ in fact, as audiences were intrigued to see what happened next with Susan gone). This story is ‘an event’ – so was ‘The Daleks’ but almost by accident; ‘by contrast ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ was planned from the first to be one of the big TV events of the year. 

 You could have forgiven the production team for playing it safe, for diluting the horror of the Daleks or replicating what they did last time out – after all, that’s what will happen with most of the Dalek stories of the colour era which tend to play safer than the other stories around them. But instead Dr Who takes a risk like never before, staking everything on the show’s greatest epic to date and one that relied a lot on the audience of children at home being grown-up enough to understand it all. It is a story, after all, that more than anything is about risk and how much you’re prepared to fight for what you love, writer Terry Nation picking up on one of the threads left dangling from the first Dalek story. By his own admission Terry didn’t do a lot of thinking before submitting his first Dalek story – it was a quick cash-in to pay the rent and the main reason it became Dr Who’s first journey into the future was for the highly practical reason that Nation was the only writer who’d delivered his scripts on time. However every reporter in Britain (and more than a few around the world) had been ringing the writer up to ask how he could possibly come up with the year’s hottest invention and even though the honest answer would have been ‘I don’t know, I was in a hurry’ Terry was too much of a salesman and storyteller to leave it at that. Instead the writer made up a fake story about seeing the words ‘Dal-Lek’ on the side of a dictionary (long since disproven; it was just a collection of letters that sounded good when Terry’s hands fell over the letters on a typewriter), then looked back into his subconscious for inspiration, remembering the stories he’s made up in the war about the evil baddies that his parents were away fighting and how the Daleks were like the Nazis, scared children who exterminated because that was easier than being loving and being vulnerable to hurt. 

 If the first Dalek story was a sort-of metaphor about how World War Two might have gone if the allies hadn’t won, then in this second one the parallels are clear and definite. Ian and Barbara have been trying to get home ever since the series began, but their home has been invaded by their mortal enemy and so, as a result, has ours. We’re no longer removed from the Dalek/Nazi threat by having it happen on an alien planet: this is all happening to ‘us’. The script plays up even more a particular generation’s fears of what might have been done to Britain had the Nazis invaded us (they came close after all, as far as the Channel Islands; had Hitler not grown over-confident and started fighting the Russians on the other side of us he might well have done it too: amateur architect that he was, he’d even drawn up plans for the new buildings he was going to create out of the rubble of our destroyed cities). This isn’t ‘Planet Of the Apes’ with the surprising twist at the end that these awful things were happening to Earth all the time: despite the setting 200 odd years hence it’s a series that screams 1960s London in everything from the locations to the busses to the advertising hoardings, a story that’s meant to chill you with the sight of the biggest terrors of the universe invading our streets and our houses and making us their slaves. And there are lots of locations all filled with Daleks: Trafalgar Square (where they’re scaring the pigeons), the foot of the Duke of Cambridge statue in Whitehall (the guy on the horse: he was rare Royal who properly fought in a war, in the Crimea, and was a cousin of Queen Victoria – the Daleks missed a trick not hanging around one of the slave trader millionaires who paid to build London though really), the Royal Albert Hall (as featured on various live album covers by the likes of The Moody Blues and Pentangle), Nelson’s Column (guy high up on a plinth) and the Cenotaph, London’s memorial for the WW1 (this would have been the single most controversial thing if they did it today – we’re forever getting right-wing riots around this for some reason, generally as a colossal misunderstanding of what the cenotaph is for: like this story it’s to remember the fallen so nobody ever has to go through what they did, not turn them into celebrities. It was only meant to be temporary and erected for a war parade. That was in 1918. It’s still there). It wouldn’t be Dr Who without a quarry too though and we get out very first, at Stone in Kent which doubles for the mines the humans are digging in a quite spectacular screen filled with dozens of extras that’s the one shot in the story that really does lok like a big budget war movie. The chase sequence involving lorries, meanwhile, isn’t on an actual London road: it’s a back lot at Ealing Film studios. Going to actual places a lot of the viewing audience knew makes this all seem so real, more like a documentary than a drama and while Dr Who wasn’t the first drama to film in real-life places by any means it’s the first one to go for the jugular in such an obvious way, rather than for colour and variety. It really helps make the point of the story. ‘The Daleks’ was a warning message of what might happen one day if we let people like the Nazis rise to power again; ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ is that one day happening in front of us now. 

People were expecting Dalek on Dalek battles – instead they got a war movie, but one where British pluck is up against a race that’s close enough unstoppable. Dr Who was, is and hopefully always be one of the most British series on television (where else would you get an eccentric in fancy dress running around exploring the universe at random most politely?) and Ian, Barbara and Susan all believe that London in 1963 is the greatest place in the universe, so to see their home – our home – in the near-future invaded by giant mobile tanks all giving the Nazi salute with their sink plungers and talking about ‘final solutions’ of the human race is chilling in a way a re-match on Skaro could never be. The shots of the Daleks, who we’d only ever seen in their own city, parading past such iconic landmarks as Westminster Bridge, Nelson’s Column, The Albert Hall and Trafalgar Square in the series’ first substantial location filming (shot really early one morning by a skeleton crew before the police moved them on – and demanded to know why so many monuments had been covered in indecipherable Dalek graffiti) aren’t just some of the most famous scenes in Dr Who but in British TV as a whole: even people who’ve never watched an episode of Dr Who in their life know these clips repeated in many a programme, the ultimate example of the ordinary becoming extraordinary in this series’ hands. 

 These Daleks are even more like traditional Nazis than before too: cruel, cunning, even more ruthless, obsessed by racial purity so that feels as if they directly attack the traditional British traits of pluck and individualism. It’s no coincidence that the big money shot is the Daleks trundling over Westminster Bridge as if they’re on their way to take over the houses of parliament: this is democracy and an entire way of life at risk. Nowadays we’d be forgiven for cheering the Daleks on, but back in 1964 the houses of parliament were a symbol of exactly what people had been fighting at the front to save. Given that sort of a plot you’d be forgiven to think that this story ends up being a celebration of how we won the war anyway, how our spirit was never dimmed, how we fought the Daleks on the beaches (because they’d get stuck in the sand), fought them on the stairs etc etc, but no. ‘The Daleks’ has it both ways about whether war is awful or whether war is necessary by showing us that it’s both, encouraging the Thals to stand up for their way of life but also being haunted by the trauma of what they go through. Like many a 1960s Dr Who story it feels like a conversation between parents and children at home discussing whether war is noble or not. ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ is that story accelerated: the people in this story fight back because to let the Daleks swoop in and take everything that Humans created as part of their civilisation over millions of years without a fight is unthinkable, but it’s not glamorous or heroic, it’s tragic. The single bravest thing about this story is how brutal and realistic it is and how it tells the truth about ‘we’ very nearly didn’t win. Twenty years on from the end of the war and Nation is worried that the people who didn’t live through it have romanticised it, turned it into a myth and legend, a war we were always destined to win and a minor setback on humanity’s progress to the stars instead of the complete annihilation of democracy that it nearly was. The films the Americans are making over in Hollywood and even some of the British ones are about how victory was never properly in doubt. But for the young writer, sitting in his family shelter trying to make up stories to amuse himself while the sirens were blaring, that blatantly wasn’t true: he’d imagined his parents running into all kinds of awful things (amazingly his soldier dad and his air warden volunteer mum both survived the war unscathed). So Terry takes this chance to look again at the war and strips that myth away by showing what it was really lie and never shying away from the ugly side of life: there’s a black market of rationing going on, profiteers, collaborators, a resistance who bicker and fight amongst themselves rather than a coordinated effort of heroes and a Dalek sounding just like Lord Haw-Haw (a posh Britisher hired by the Germans to deliver biased statements about the war designed to make people on these shores think winning was impossible and they might as well give up). Larry, the friend of ian whose hunting for his missing brother and whose exactly the sort of plucky everyday hero you’d expect to live, dies trying to prevent his own brother killing him and Ian. For a while Jenny was designed as the new companion to replace Susan (before a muddle about how many weeks the series was renewed scuppered those plans) and she’s Terry Nation’s acidic, cynical voice, declaring at one stage ‘you’ve got this romantic idea about resistance – there’s nothing heroic about dying’ (Terry will have another go at writing her as his ‘other’ mouth piece Sara Kingdom in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ the following Christmas, always fascinated as he is in his work about how good people can become twisted and bitter when the world goes wrong and Jenny is good, just disillusioned). 

Our very first opening scene, our long awaited return to London after a year of adventures, has the Tardis land in a bombsite, ruins on one side and a river with a sign reminding people ‘not to dump bodies’ there on the other. Half the people we meet are conspirators, in league with the Daleks up to their eyeballs, selling their own species out wholesale in return for a few scraps of food and the chance to live a few days longer (a quick word about Jean Conroy whose only in one episode as the elder of the two women at the shack in the woods but utterly sells the wide-eyed desperation of someone at wit’s end – sadly she became the first person in Dr Who ever to die, a month short of her 30th birthday, in a car accident on November 14th before the first episode of this story was even transmitted never mind her part on December 19th and it’s a tragedy given the impact of her only surviving acting role. Poor Richard martin the director, too: she was a longtime family friend he’d hired as a thankyou and he still had to work and study the rushes of her after her death for final editing). The other half of Brits are plucky and brave and heroic, but it’s mostly for nothing: so far in Dr Who most humans die because that’s what happened in history or in future stories because they ‘deserve’ it by doing something wrong, but time and again in this script we see people sacrifice their lives for not very much at all, a resistance who fight to the death for no good result; few Who scenes are as affecting as the one where Dortmun, bomb strapped to his wheelchair and a symbol of everything the Nazi-Daleks hate (physically damaged, brave, stubborn, refusing to take orders), cycles over to the Daleks with absolutely no chance of escape just to blow up a few extra of the enemy in a planet invaded by millions of them. Goodness knows extermination is scary enough already, but this story also plays up the fact that the worse horrors in the war happened to people who lived long enough to remember it: we get to see a sort of prototype of the Cybermen ‘conversion’ in this story, as humans have their personalities and individualities sucked out of them to become ‘robomen’; this too was British people’s primal fears of the War, that Hitler would come along and not just symbolically ‘make the trains run on time’ but replace all the quirky English steam trains with big ugly metal monsters that all looked the same as he did so. It’s like Nation took all the memorable half-digested nightmares stuck together in one unfeeling mass, with a cathartic ending that wins against evil all over again that’s designed to make us feel better in a bigger way than just ‘the story has to end somewhere’. By the time we see the smoke rising from a battle-scarred Earth everyone in this story is asking themselves ‘what was it all for?’, including the Daleks blown to kingdom come. 

 In amongst all this the regulars are pushed further out their comfort zones than ever before but nail every sentence they’re given. You feel Ian’s desperation at landing in the right place at the wrong time and his borderline hysterics when Barbara goes missing, while his attempt to hide in the very bomb the Daleks are using is one of the single bravest things one of the bravest of companions ever does (and like a true plucky Brit he doesn’t even undo his tie while he does it). Even more so for Barbara, who gets to run for her life across deserted London streets before driving into a sea of Nazi-symbolic Daleks and knocking them like skittles, to the accompaniment of one of the most urgent, manic and percussion-heavy incidental scores of them all. Frankly every time a new production team boasted they were creating the first ‘feminist’ companion in DW they were wrong: Barbara was doing it all first, the epitome of plucky land girls everywhere, making do and mending, even on alien worlds or trapped in the distant past. Most key of all is the way Barbara stays hopeful: that’s the difference between her and Jenny and the reason why she’s revived long enough to make it this far in her adventures and they make a worthy pairing (and if you’re wondering why balaclavas seem to be back in fashion in 2164 or whenever this story is set it’s because they wanted her to have a blonde hairdo in contrast to Barbara’s dark bob, only they still hadn’t negotiated this during the location filming they did first, so they covered up her head instead). 

 This is the beginning of the end for poor William Hartnell, whose injured in an accident during rehearsals when the extras carrying him up a Dalek ramp accidentally drop him headfirst into a ‘camera steering circle’ designed to help move a camera around a set, badly bruising his back in the process. It was quite a serious accident, so much so that the Hartnell family got their solicitor to look into ‘unsafe at work practices’ before being calmed down with a week’s rest on full pay and a massive apology (extra Edmund Hardwicke playing his unconscious body out of shot for the episode and local lad David getting most of the Dr’s lines – and a surprising degree of his knowledge to boot). While what really did Hartnell in over time was his arteriosclerosis that limited the oxygen flowing to his brain and made thinking and line learning difficult, Hartnell is never quite the same again after this, not just in this story but for the rest of his run as the Doctor (his infamous ‘Billy fluffs’ get worse and worse from here on in). Even so, when the script demands something more than usual from him he delivers in spades and the contrast between Nation’s first Dalek story and this one is how heroic the Doctor is: he’s always brave, always moral, always inspiring people to do the right thing. In a changing world of people you’re never quite sure you can trust he’s an immovable object, stubbornly standing up for everyone’s rights and that’s the way he’s been portrayed almost always ever since. This story contains some of the best speeches any of the Doctors ever gave: a nation who’d lived through the war will be cheering Hartnell on as he mocks the Daleks in episode two just when it looks as if they’ve utterly and totally won, while his closing speech to Susan is another of the most celebrated scenes in Dr Who for good reason, full of tenderness and sadness. At the time director, producer and writer were all miffed that Hartnell had ‘accidentally’ cut the closing speech in half but recognised his delivery was so good they didn’t want to go for another take. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that not all of Hartnell’s fluffs were for his illness – some were because he thought the lines were stupid (the missing parts are the oddly sexist ‘Work hard both of you. Be gentle with her David and show her that life on Earth with love and understanding can be a great adventure…And remember love is the most precious jewel of all’. Although the one line everyone quotes from this story was a Hartnell ad lib, as he warns his grand-daughter of getting a smacked bottom, something they spend a whole episode telling us was ‘wrong’ and wouldn’t happen nowadays in ‘Twice Upon A Time’ (to be fair it’s perfectly in character and fits a control freak timelord who realises his grand-daughter is growing older and independent and not listening to him anymore. Plus she’s family. Plus its 1963. It was all quite normal in child upbringing at the time and a long time afterwards). 

 And why is this closing scene so moving? Because it’s the first time a companion ever leaves, Carole Ann Ford getting understandably bored of screaming and twisting her ankle every week (after all, she’s already done both of those things in this story’s first episode never kind the rest of the year). For the most part she’s as under-used here as ever, her main role being to sit around looking sulky and giving up early on even for her, but her performance lifts considerably in the last two parts as she falls in love with local rebel fighter David (owner of our first Scottish accent in the series – it won’t be the last) and gets to be a cheeky, silly teenager again in a way we haven’t seen since ‘An Unearthly Child’. David is an odd character. He’s naturally gentle and forgiving and utopian but the war and what he’s seen has made him tough, cynical and jumpy. It’s a good pairing in some ways, if Susan brings out his caring protective side, but is another mouth to feed whose more likely to scream at hardship than solve it really what he needs? Of all the companions we ever meet Susan is positively the last person who’ll be able to cope in a war-marked London where survival means going back to the soil. Like many a companion departure to come it feels rushed and sudden and unlike every other companion departure you wonder how the Dr can bring himself to abandon his own grand-daughter on an alien planet with someone she’s only just met (and who, after all, she’ll live to see grow old and die long before her, as some of the Big Finish stories have played up). Thinking about it later, you have to question why the Doctor didn’t at least invite David on board the Tardis – and no doubt huff and pout that he wasn’t good enough for his grand-daughter. However, in context, it also feels rather sweet: this set of regulars, perhaps even more than all the ones to come, were super-close and that isn’t just acting when the Doctor locks Susan out of the Tardis ‘for her own good’ and she looks up at him with big watering eyes, a major part of her life over for good. Having a fish dropped in your face wouldn’t be my idea of a courtship, but for what it is this romance also feels ‘real’ in a way so many later ones won’t and it makes sense, given how many Dr Who stories in this first year are about making your own way in the world and not being afraid to follow your dreams, that it should end like this for at least one of the people we’ve come to know and love across the past year. It’s also very fitting that in this grim story filled with such despair in particular there is a message that life goes on and that love is what everyone was fighting so hard for (we’ll skirt overt the fact that everyone was also fighting over the freedom o make their own choices, given that the Doctor doesn’t even try to give Susan alternatives here). It’s a lot better than the alternatives (disappearing between stories without a word or dying) would have been anyway and at last Susan gets to put down the roots she always dreamed of having, even if it is on a disintegrated Earth that’s going to take decades before it gets to fully recover. The best part is what follows that famous speech (re-used in ‘The Five Doctors’) too: Susan discards her Tardis key in her rush to get back to David, the one thing that was once so precious to her she risked her life for it in ‘Marco Polo’ now counting for nothing because Susan won’t need it in her new life. 

 I suspect that last speech and the key part was script editor David Whittaker’s un-credited invention (sadly his last job in that role, though he’ll be back as writer often over the next six years) more than it was Terry Nation’s: as with the first story Whittaker breathes life and emotion and character into Terry’s strengths of plot and adventure and they really make for a formidable partnership across their two stories, each giving the other room to do their ‘thing’ without diluting what the other is trying to do (something not all script writers working with Nation manage to juggle). Whittaker was a master of showing characters going through big life changes and having feelings and in a war there are lots of feelings around (which is why history channels and dramas alike are so obsessed with WW2 that they haven’t let it go even eighty years on). In many ways, of all 328-ish DW stories out there, this is the one with the most ‘heart’, from the people we meet to the happy-sad ending to all the peril we see along the way, not least because it puts the humans in such contrast against the Daleks, full of love and sorrow and regret and guilt fighting a race that doesn’t have any. If you don’t feel anything after watching this story well, you’re a Cyberman (not a Dalek: they do have intense feelings, just the same ones of anger and hate). Perhaps because of the extra attention this story got it also received the first official complaint that the series had gone too far, with a much-publicised letter that the level of violence was too strong (actually it isn’t: most of the bodies we see were like that when we got there and the Daleks threaten more than they exterminate in this story, so that’s more a testament to nation and Whittaker’s script hinting at stuff we don’t see). Verity Lambert, as producer, was responsible for replying (in the media as well as to the writer) and her closing comments are particularly interesting in light of this story’s ethos: that ‘death is a part of life’ and needs to be shown on screen if a drama is to have any hope of feeling ‘real’. 

 There are some problems of course – actually quite a lot of problems. The Dalek’s plan is bonkers even by their standards: they use the cover of a meteorite to unleash a plague that makes humans weak and spits them up into communities too small to fight back. I get that so far (it’s basically what happened and is indeed still happening with covid). Only…The Daleks need human muscle to hollow out the Earth and needs them to be at full strength. Why is everyone digging? The plan is to remove Earth’s magnetic core so that the Daleks can – and I’m just checking this again to make sure I’ve got this right – de-magnetise the Earth, replace it with an engine, then turn our planet into a spaceship and pilot it around space. If that’s all they want then why not steal, say, a towns worth of locals and then transport them to Jupiter, Saturn or Uranus and hollow those planets out instead? (Not Mars: aside from being full of Ice Warriors it doesn’t have a set of magnetic poles). There’d be much less resistance then and Daleks are nothing if not pragmatic. And if the Daleks have control of the whole earth why are they digging in London where the tectonic plates are as stable as they are anywhere rather than, say, Indonesia (the Earthquake capital of the world)? I totally get why the rest of the story is set in London for the war imagery, but the mining doesn’t have to be. I get what Nation was trying to do: he’d made a lot of play in the debut story about how the Daleks move through static electricity and for a lot of this story they wheel around with satellite dishes on their back, looking for all the world as if they’re about to tune into the scifi hour on UK Gold, but it’s a clumsy way of fitting that in when every future Dalek writer (including terry himself) happily ignores this point from now on anyway. Could it be that Nation was thinking here about the Nazi obsession with the legend of a race of giants who lived in the centre of the Earth and who were thought to have an entrance at the South Pole? And why do the Daleks need to zoom round space at all when they have a properly functional flying saucer? We never find out (maybe it’s because it’s one of the worst model shots in a series that’s generally pretty imaginative at creating them – this is the only bit of any Dr Who story that looks as if it was lifted direct from a 1950s scifi B movie flick, wobbling against an obvious backdrop. You can even see the strings. Although that said even this looks as if it was closely modelled on ‘The Bell’, the Nazi attempt to replicate a ufo that according to ufo documentaries may but almost certainly didn’t get as far as being built in the final years of the war). 

 The robomen are ridiculous: they’re braindead humans who’ve been genetically manipulated into following direct orders, but why have the daleks taken their intelligence rather than their obedience away/ Most can barely strong a sentence together, never mind do what’s actually quite tricky technical work. And how do people this braindead know to eat and sleep without being told (unless there’s a Dalek dietician and nutritionist reminding them to eat somewhere). I see what they were trying to do with Jenny and Ann Davies tries her best, but having a second sulky brat hanging around with Susan there too is at least one too many (it’s hard to imagine what she would have done in future stories, but it would have set a very different flavour having someone who wasn’t being grand-daughterly to the Doctor but instead huffing saying things like ‘it was much harder in my day…call a fight against a lion hard work? Pull your socks up you Romans!’) As we haven’t had enough jeopardy already they throw in a crocodile that’s clearly a baby and more cuddly than killer: there’s quite enough drama going on with daleks already thanks. Some of the dialogue is very ripe, an uneasy mix of war movie drama and B-movie scifi depending whose speaking. As downright brilliant as the best bits of this story are there’s still quite a lot of padding, particularly two-thirds of the way through when, just as with his first Dalek script, Terry runs out of new things to say so goes back to say some of them all over again less effectively. None of that really matters though: this is still a particularly special story from a particularly special era of the show, delivered by a cast and production team going out of their way to make it as special as they can. 

 And nothing is as special as the ending when everyone celebrates VD (Victory Over Daleks) Day, a day that most people living through it the first time were too shocked and stunned to properly take in. Despite what they like to make out in the endless WW2 documentaries on the history channel and the like, the end of the war was far from a foregone conclusion and good doesn’t always triumph over evil. The fact that it did, just this once, in 1945 was so incredible to so many of the people who lived through it and had consigned themselves to the worst for years (in a very British way, without talking about it out loud) that some people are still processing the ripples from it now (and increasingly fed up whenever one of those ripples we thought we’d extinguished on the right starts growing in size and weight again). By the end, after everything everyone has been through, you feel a lot of that same mixture of relief, joy and frustration that it ever had to happen at all. They even have Big Ben bonging away, something it was never allowed to do in the war (and the moment most Londoners realised, after years of propaganda encouraging them to be hopeful, that the war was well and truly over). While no one quite mentions the war by name yet (it’s too soon in 1964: there’d be letters about how our fallen heroes have been turned into ‘entertainment’ on a children’s show; after all nineteen years isn’t that much of a gap: that’s the year before the DW revival is now and that still seems like yesterday) everybody watching knew what this was about, even the target audience who were too young to have experienced it firsthand themselves. That’s why everyone is going the extra mile for this one: because they all remembered what it was like and making a story that’s so strongly rooted in real life is always going to get a different performance to one that’s purely fictional. The budget is clearly way higher than the stories around it but they use it so cleverly, where it matters, in the locations, the extras, the added Dalek models (bit not everywhere: the signs in the first episode saying ‘vetoed’ are a joke – they’re what designers would have to add to their original designs for BBC paper-works when they were told something they’d designed would cost too much. The use of the signs in an actual location that’s there for free rather than a set is a real director’s joke!) They were even allowed to film this in Riverside Studios for the first time, much larger than the cramped space down the road at Lime Grove, which is where they’ll be more often than not for the rest of the 1960s. The musical score, generally a leftover in 1960s Dr Who nobody cares too much about, is given centre space and is utterly brilliant, Francis Chagrin putting together a musique concrete score heavy on percussion that feels like this story should, recognisably like the 1960s but weirder and harsher (sadly it’s his only score, much to my Chagrin: and of all the people involved in this story he’s the one for whom the Nazi imagery is most personal, his family moving to Britain from Romania as late as 1936 with many of his relatives ending up in Nazi war camps. 

 To some extent this story’s impact as the ‘special’ Who story that was brave enough to look at the war has diminished the further we’ve got away from the end of it, so that this story feels like a ‘historical’ from a time we can never fully understand without living there, to go alongside the tales of Romans and Aztecs, albeit set in the future and with aliens filling in as the baddy, but even with Daleks and ‘space graffiti’ everywhere you get a much stronger sense of what it was actually like to live through the war in this story, convinced you were about to die at any second, than any documentary with talking heads of people pretending to have all the answers. Nobody knows how things are going to turn out in a war. Even the Doctor only gets a ‘hollow’ victory (in as much as the Daleks were halfway through their plan to hollow the Earth when they were stopped). By showing the recent past for what it really was, at a time when few programmes were brave enough to do that, all in a much anticipated story where millions of children would be watching, that all adds up to make ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ one of the bravest bits of DW and British TV ever made, a script about bravery that doesn’t shy away from the tough parts. Just like the new-look Doctor. 

 POSITIVES + In the future Dr Who will take the ‘delay the creature in the title appearing until the first episode cliffhanger’ technique to absurd lengths, but here its perfect. Back before overall titles were needed for videos and DVDs and the like Dr Who stories had individual episode titles and ran from the end of one story directly into another. So, despite a big puff piece in the Radio Times mentioning that the Daleks were coming back, quite a few people watching ‘World’s End’ (as episode one was known) would have expected to see a straightforward ‘Earth in the future destroyed by cold war’ type allegory. They certainly wouldn’t been expecting the moment when a Dalek looms out of the River Thames out of nowhere (indeed, the first story had been at pains to say that the Daleks couldn’t run without the power from their city so to see them here at all, with an anti-gravity device on their backs, makes for one of the greatest of all Dr Who cliffhangers, right up there with the very first shot of a Dalek from the year before). Poor Robert Jewell though: due to health and safety he operated this Dalek in full water wings and spent hours stuck in the mud before being pulled out (unseen…well mostly) by a tow-rope. He’ll get a cushier part in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ as a thankyou..playing crooner Bing Crosby (no, really). A quick word too on that episode title ‘World’ End’ which is one of my favourite Dr Who puns: yes the world seems to be ending now the Daleks have arrived but it’s also the location where the Tardis lands, a genuine place near Chelsea (and named after a famous pub that used to be on the corner, not a Dalek invasion, itself named as a joke because it was on the fringes of London, the ‘world’ for most Londoners who never ventured outside, and the infamous pot-holes that meant going that far out of your way could be dangerous). 

 NEGATIVES - The Slyther is clearly signposted as ‘the next Dalek’ simply because it’s a new monster from the pen of the man who created the Daleks (had they learned nothing from the Voord?!?) He’s basically what the Daleks look like without their outer shells, albeit even squigglier and uglier and more mutated. There’s no reason given in the script whatsoever as to why the Daleks, the most merciless unfeeling people in the universe, have decided to bring their pet from home and put them in an Earth lake. Except that the script needs a bit of peril in the middle (as if there isn’t enough already on an Earth overtaken by Daleks). It’s also the one bit of this story that isn’t a neat WW2 parable (unless of course there’s a war story I somehow don’t know about). It’s appearance makes for one of the silliest Dr Who cliffhangers in a story otherwise marked out for its realism and plausibility. 

BEST QUOTE: 'Rebels of London, this is our last offer - our final warning. Leave your hiding places. Show yourselves in the open streets. You will be fed and watered. Work is needed from you... but the Daleks offer you life. Rebel against us and the Daleks will destroy London completely. You will all die. The males, the females, the descendants. Rebels of London, come out of your hiding places. The Daleks offer you life!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘A Time and A Place’, a comic strip from a 1993 issue of Dr Who Magazine, was the first to fill us in on what happened to Susan next, although she herself doesn’t actually appear. Susan has a daughter she’s rather sweetly named Barbara (not mentioned in Big Finish) and its her the 7th Doctor meets on a return visit to return the now-mended shoe she once broke all those years ago during ‘Invasion Earth’. Barbara talks about her mother has put down roots and stopped travelling but doesn’t add much more. 

 We do however learn more when Susan and Barbara II turn up again in the 8th Doctor novel ‘Legacy Of The Daleks’ (1998) by the only writer Terry Nation allowed to touch The Daleks for years, John Peel. The 8th Doctor isn’t actually looking to meet Susan on this adventure – he’s really looking for his regular companion, Sam, when he feels his grand-daughter’s psychic connection crying out for help. In this rather bleak story Susan and David have split up, in part because he’s growing older while she still looks like a fifteen-year-old girl! Life in the post-Dalek 22nd century is hard work too, full of political in-fighting, poverty and chaos. This is a busy book, filled with lots of human characters and Daleks and the Delgado version of The Master thrown in there for good measure too. There’s one great scene, where Susan gets to be the heroine and cause the Master’s regeneration into the emaciated ‘Deadly Assassin’ version which is a rewarding pay-off, but the rest of this book is a little heavy going and not at all the utopian future the Doctor hoped for his grand-child when he kicked her out of the Tardis. 

 Slightly happier is ‘An Earthly Child’ (2009), a Big Finish audio story by Marc ‘Ghostlight’ Platt that fills in what happened to Susan since being left behind in 22nd century London. Of all the Doctors she expects to see as a grown-up it probably wasn’t the 8th one! Carole Ann Ford makes for a great double act with Paul McGann, bringing out his protective grandfatherly side, even while Susan – who now appears much older than he does – feels maternal and protective towards him. She even has a grandchild of her own now, Alex Campbell, whose a lot more like his great-grandfather than she’s willing to acknowledge. The actual plot itself isn’t up to much, being more of a cloak-and-dagger politics kind of story, but for the central characters and their unusual relationship to each other it’s a must-hear. Susan and Alex come back for the end of the following year of 8th Doctor adventures too, ‘Relative Dimensions’ ‘Lucie Miller’ and ‘To The Death’ (the first of which is one of the best McGann stories in the range and a good place to start if you’re new). 

 ‘Masters Of Earth’ (2014) is another Big Finish story released on the 50th anniversary of the broadcast of ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ and is #193 in the main range of Dr Who stories. Set the year before events in the story, it sees the 6th Doctor and Peri arrive in a Dalek-infested Scotland, full of resistance pockets just like the main story. The drama comes from the fact that the Doctor knows he can’t interfere – if he does then he might unravel the future he created for himself the first time round. It’s a nice idea and it sounds great, with the production team going to the trouble of digging out some period 1960s Dalek sound effects, but the 6th Doctor and peri never feel quite right in this world and the plot itself isn’t much to write home about. 

 Not forgetting ‘Dalek – Invasion Earth 2150 AD’, the big budget film adaptation from 1965 which continues the story of Peter Cushing’s Doctor, who rather than being an alien is an eccentric human inventor who built the Tardis in his shed. The same cast appear with the exception of Jill Curzon as a Barbara clone and Bernard Cribbins in place of Roy Castle, making his first Who-related appearance over forty years before he played Wilfred Mott. He’s about the best thing in this film, which again has a much bigger budget than the TV version, colour and a lot more action on its side but never comes close to matching the acting or scripting heights of the original and best. A third story, based on ‘The Chase’ was planned for 1966 but dropped after sales of this story were lower than the first film (personally I’d loved to have seen them have a go, though it’s ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ that was crying out to be made on a big film budget). 

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