The Daleks aka The Dead Planet aka The Mutants: Ranking - 50

 

The Daleks 

(aka The Dead Planet aka The Mutants)

(Season 1, Dr 1 with Ian, Barbara and Susan, 21/12/1963-1/2/1964, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: David Whittaker, writer: Terry Nation directors: Christopher Barry and Richard Martin)

Rank: 50

In an emoji: 🪠

   'How did a Dalek keep the Skaro acid rain off him before Davros invented his casing? Ex-foliate!'

 

Well this is it, the big one, the second ever story without which Dr Who wouldn’t have managed to last a full year, never mind sixty, the adventure which created such a stir that by the end of the seven episodes the viewing figures had gone up by 50% and turned this series from a respectable cult into a fixture of Saturday night viewing figures for the next quarter century. It is, in one fell swoop, a microcosm of everything Dr Who will become in time: a thinly veiled allegory for modern events (particularly the cold war ad the dangers of the atomic bomb – the Cuban missile crisis, the hottest point in the cold war, was barely a year old when this went out) with aliens that manage on a shoestring budget to do what decades of Hollywood movies largely couldn’t: make the future seem real and alive. ‘The Daleks’ is unlike any piece of television that had ever been on before, one that managed to be creepy without being sensational, imaginative without being impossible and entertaining without being empty. The closest any UK TV show had come before this had been our old friend ‘Quatermass’ and that still felt recognisably like ‘our’ world, with its scientists and heroes and people always with a plan fighting aliens who came to us, but this story is something new again, as people like us explore an utterly alien world unlike anything on Earth, all from a tiny corner of a cramped BBC studio in Lime Grove. 

And all this despite the story being the absolute opposite of what creator Sydney Newman had intended for the show – in his head Dr Who was educational, discussing matters of history and science, bringing other worlds to life. It was about people, not killer ‘bug-eyed monsters’ on alien worlds. Had there been any other script ready to go except this one it almost certainly wouldn’t have been made at all. But there wasn’t – and there very nearly wasn’t this script either. Terry Nation, up and coming comedy writer, had been invited to send in a script following a one-off scifi he’d written for anthology series ‘Out Of This World’ (the forerunner to ‘Out Of The Unknown’, now all but forgotten as only a single episode exists and not a terribly good one – and you think Dr Who had it bad in the missing episode stakes!) but the writer had turned it down huffily. He was a ‘proper writer’ not a children’s writer and besides, he’d just got a lucrative dream gig with leading comedian Tony Hancock (and had even hired Hancock’s brother Roger as his agent to turn this job down for him). But in a move that seems like a future Dr Who story about being careful what you wish for, writer and comedian had a colossal falling out (Hancock was in his ‘1st Dr’ phase, crotchety and paranoid and unable to see how loved he was) and Terry Nation found himself jobless without warning, sent home from a potentially lucrative tour with no way of paying the rent. Rather sheepishly he rang up asking if the Dr Who gig was still open and, to put the production team in a good mood, wrote this story very very quickly, way ahead of deadlines – which was just what Who producer Verity Lambert needed given how many other commissioned stories were falling through left right and centre. 

 No one seems to have told Terry about Newman’s ‘bug-eyed monster’ phobia, but then The Daleks are the least bug-eyed of all aliens: they’re housed inside tanks on wheels that perfectly fits the back story (a nuclear war that’s destroyed their home planet Skaro and who are still dealing with the radioactive fallout) and makes them unlike anything else anyone had ever seen before. Most of all they don’t look like Human actors in suits or puppets at a time when every other alien ever created for big or small screen did; looking at them you really could fool yourself into thinking they were an alien race on another world. There has been much debate about who deserves more credit for The Daleks, whether it was Terry Nation or designer Raymond Cusick, but honestly it was both and wouldn’t have worked without the other. It was Nation’s idea to have an alien that would be more than just a man standing up, where the legs would be covered so the Dalek would glide across the floor like the Georgian State dancers he’d seen once on stage, their legs hidden by their skirts. It’s worth repeating the script description of the Daleks in its entirety, to show how little Cusick had to go on: ‘We see four hideous machine-like creatures. They are legless, moving on a round base. They have no human features. A lens on a flexible shaft acts as an eye. There are arms with mechanical grips for hands. The creatures hold strange weapons in their hands. One of them glides forward and speaks in am echoing metallic voice’. All the elements are there then, but no design as such, just a collection of ideas. 

It was Cusick who took that idea and ran with it, taking the few simple lines in Nation’s script and working out how a creature like that might evolve in a futuristic city with a design based around an actor sitting down, Verity’s sort of overseer producer Mervyn Pinfield adding the touch that they should be more like fairground bumper cars driven by the static electricity of Skaro’s floors. Everyone around Ray told him that it couldn’t be done on budget, Pinfield convinced that the design would cost too much and got as far as looking into buying plastic tubing for an actor to wear, but Cusick was having none of it and kept refining his idea to find a compromise between looking right and being on budget. We fan got very lucky: Cusick wasn’t even the intended designer on this series (that was future star director Ridley Scott, who borrows a lot more from Dr Who for his films ‘Alien’ and ‘Blade Runner’ than people realise, but who dropped out when he got another job offer). Like so many people in Dr Who’s early days he went far above and beyond what he needed to have done to make this show work and he was rightly aggrieved that Nation got all the fame, the merchandising rights and the money, given that he was a BBC employee not entitled to any extra fees for his designs, taking his grievance with him to his death in 2013. But then no TV creature had ever had the runaway success The Daleks had over Christmas 1963 when the nation’s playgrounds were full of children asking ‘did you see what I saw last night?’ and copying the Daleks (their copyability being such a key part to their success – anyone who could stick their arms out and ‘glide’ with their feet could act like a Dalek without any costume or budget and everyone who’d seen them would know who they were) so the BBC hadn’t had to deal with anything like this before and didn’t quite know what to do. They really should have cut Ray a special deal though to keep him on side though: it’s so very much to Dr Who’s loss that Cusick didn’t get to create more designs for the show past 1965. Shawcroft Models, too, never get the recognition they deserve for actually building the things, back a time when they could have been forgiven for slapping something cheap and easy together for a cheap kiddies show. 

There are several things that make The Daleks special. For one thing nobody at home could be entirely sure that they weren’t actually aliens, given that no actors could be seen (it wasn’t till later that the BBC revealed how they were made, with an ‘operator’ inside pedalling, first with their feet and later on tricycle wheels).They have a highly distinctive exterminator effect that makes the picture turn negative, just like a camera (or a radiation bomb – they’re a jet that can deliver an atomic bomb but on wheels and with the ability to pick out individual people to kill rather than a whole area). Till now most monsters in scifi are most creepy by standing still and being static and ‘looming’ but the Daleks are restless little balls of energy, forever moving even when they’re not doing anything. They may be close to death, doomed to fall sick with radiation if they ever leave their casings, but they are at their most unstoppably alive here. They’re not thick aliens who are living off instinct and more like animals, as in most 1950s scifi B movies but intelligent beings who scheme and plot and outwit the Humans and Thals easily – and at a time when we didn’t quite know who the Doctor was and he seemed a feeble old man we didn’t yet know that he could defeat them. They were born for black-and-white telly, their angular shapes casting eerie shadows against the set which was cleverly built, again by Cusick, to make the most odd their odd angles and distinctive silhouette. For all the things that people will come to laugh about the Daleks (their inability to climb stairs, go over trough terrain, go fast and their lack of manoeuvrability) none of these things apply in the superbly built Dalek city which is designed for them to skulk around. The model is as great as the interiors too, all straight lines and right angles perfectly fitting a race who talk in such staccato voices (there’s no smoothed edges with the Daleks; I’m surprised the Thals don’t live in domes just to ram the point home) – it’s actually a last minute replacement, built for the remounted episode one when Cusick was upset with the first version, but even the photos that have survived of that one are a thing of beauty, with far more time and care taken over it than most Who model shots. This is a place that’s been thought through, that accentuates the Dalek’s strengths and removes their weaknesses and as scary as they’ll seem in stories to come, overtaking ‘our’ world or travelling across space and time, they’re never quite as scary again as they are here I don’t think. One point that modern fans always miss too: just look at how much CCTV the Daleks have, at a time when it was a newfangled idea hardly anyone knew about rather than something you can see on every street corner. To the viewers of 1963 having images on a TV screen in the middle of a story might well be the single most ‘futuristic’ thing about this story and Christopher Barry understands how much it makes the viewer feel a part of the action – Barbara even puts her hands over the camera at one stage, as if we’re a part of the wall and we’re watching a nature documentary play out with humans as the ‘animals’ rather than a drama. 

Perhaps the most under-rated part of all though were those voices, played through a device known as a ring modulator that took the top and bottom out of the frequencies out of the sound to make them sound harsh and alien. Director Christopher Barry deserves a lot of the credit for this: knowing that the post office had been researching a similar device to enable people without voice boxes to speak he got in touch – but after discovering the device was painful to voice, created by vibrations from the actual vocal chords and could only be used for a few minutes at a time, he kept tinkering, coming up with the final version (which had itself been used once before, as the voice of a robot, in children’s radio serial ‘Sword From The Stars’). Originally the actors inside the Dalek cases did the voices themselves, but the production team hadn’t realised what hard work it was puffing along a studio floor so all they got was muffled panting. Thinking on his feet the director hired voice actors to go sit in a studio booth, the lights flashing in synchronisation instead (not mini indicator lights yet, which is what they most resemble, but Christmas tree lights inside cut ping-pong balls; the original plan was to have the whole Dalek skirt light up when they talked, as well as an ‘inside’ casing that made them look see-through, but both ideas were dropped for cost). Dalek voice actors Peter Hawkins (higher pitched) and David Graham (lower pitched) deserve a lot of credit too, instantly getting how to make their parts sound inhuman and cruel – after all, there was no handbook or precedent for this sort of thing. Credit, too, to David Whittaker who, once he heard what they sounded like, tweaked a lot of Nation’s dialogue for them so they spoke less like humans and more like, well, Daleks: there is no debating, no pondering, no personal pronouns, no contractions even, all personality removed just basic commands, like a warped general under siege, every bit of colour and beauty civilisation aestheticness gone from their speech. And most thrilling of all the Daleks are not just robots like 99% of aliens before this (something even the Dalek annuals get wrong sometimes, never mind some future Who writers and script editors) but ‘bubbling lumps of hate’ or ‘scared children’ depending which Who actor you’re listening to, vulnerable and hopeless without their casings but with them invincible bullies. They’re a brilliant joint effort where everyone excelled themselves, the perfect marriage between idea, design and sound and even now, a hundred or so alien races on, no other Dr Who alien species has managed to nail all the aspects of design, voice and back story in quite the same way. 

It’s the ethos behind the Daleks, though, that makes them more than just another monster. For the Daleks are, as surely everyone watching at the time of first transmission sensed, the Nazis. Terry Nation had a difficult time in the Second World War, which broke out when he was nine and didn’t end till he was fifteen, absolutely at the edge where he’d have been growing anxious about being old enough to be called up. His parents, who lived near the docklands in Cardiff (in the village of Llandaff where scenes of Leadworth, the home of Amy and Rory, was filmed – which makes it doubly sad they never met a Dalek there) and so were a prime target if the Luftwaffe ever got as far as Wales, refused to evacuate him but were busy off fighting at the front (dad) or working as an air-raid warden (mum), so Terry spent great chunks of the war buried away in the family shelter alone, listening to war reports on the radio, reading comics and making up his own war stories in his head, no doubt wondering if he would even see his parents again (if they ever wanted to do a sequel to the ‘creation of Dr Who’ drama ‘An Adventure In Space and Time’ then I nominate Terry’s life: it’s fascinating). His future series ‘The Survivors’ (about the fear of losing loved ones) and ‘Blake’s 7’ (about being cannon fodder for a federation who doesn’t know who you are) are more obviously rooted in the wear but so are Terry’s Dalek scripts. The Daleks are the Nazis if they’d gone on to develop the atomic war as they were trying to across 1944-45, xenophobes who hate everyone who don’t resemble themselves. The Thals, meanwhile, come from the part of Skaro named ‘Davidus’ in the comic strips – like David, the founder of Israel (the fact that they’re stereotypical Aryan ideals, blonde and blue-eyed, just makes the whole notion of racial purity seem all the more stupid). When this story went out it had only been twenty years since the war and a lot of the people watching would have fought in it, trying to defeat a monster every bit as scary as the one on screen; famously most soldiers couldn’t bring themselves to talk about what they’d seen on re-entering everyday life, but a metaphor like the Daleks was more palatable and gave their off-spring into the horrors and dangers of war beyond the dashing tales of heroes and bravery. A clumsier writer would have made the vicious monsters the blonde ‘Aryan ideal’ to ram the point home, but Nation is subtler (well ish) than that. The pure blood lines The Daleks want to keep clean are caused by their own bloody civil war and the radioactive fallout and has nothing to do with genetics but self-caused mutation. However, they’ve forgotten over at time that they are the mutations and to them looking like a green tentacled blob is completely normal. They’re racists in tanks, scared of everyone who isn’t like them and prepared to blow them up, even though to everyone with eyes they’re the scarred, disfigured ones. Which was how a lot of people tended to think about the Nazis (after all, Hitler wasn’t exactly your traditional blonde Aryan himself and was in fact Jewish under his own laws, given his hated mother’s ancestry). For anyone watching this on first broadcast The Nazi threat was still uncomfortably real (18 years since the end of WW2 is really not that long – its, gulp, the same gap since the 21st century DW comeback in 2005 and now) – to have the Nazis lampooned like this, to have the juxtaposition between their talk of ‘purity’ and beauty and their ugly, warped ideas - is still quite a brave thing to do in the days when the people in it just didn’t talk about it, before the War is taught in every school and the History channel spends roughly 23 of its 24 hours discussing some aspect of it. 

It’s not just WW2 that’s keeping Terry Nation up at night, though, but an all too plausible World War Three to come in an era when an outbreak of war between Russia and America seemed more like ‘when’ than ‘if’ (something that must have been heightened even more when JFK was assassinated just as everyone was about to record episode three and no one was quite sure if it was a lone gunman or a Russian plot; everyone’s still not quite sure now of course but that’s another matter), but here already it’s a key part of the story. Even the people watching this the first time round who were too young to remember the war firsthand lived under the threat of another one, with atomic bombs. For a lot of this story the Daleks aren’t just a danger because of who they are now but what they did in the past, causing the radiation poisoning that makes our heroes sick and which has made the ‘screaming jungle’ ‘petrified’, held in one place just like all those pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bomb was dropped in 1945 (it’s an image Nation will use again and again in his work). What a lot of people who come to this story late don’t always realise is that ‘The Daleks’ as a story isn’t just a history lesson but a warning of what might happen if the cold war and the competition between two very different ways of life ever gets out of hand. After all, Dr Who is a cold war baby: the first two stories both deal to some extent with mankind’s urge to wipe out people who don’t agree with them out and people being powerless to stop it. In other words, no wonder this story made such a splash at the time. ‘The Daleks’ offer a sort of catharsis, in a (relatively) safe setting that still taps into just how scary and deadly those days of war were and how relentless the enemy was. Every Dr Who story to come stands on this one’s shoulders to some extent, as it made the show a hit and pushed it into new territory nobody could have dreamed of when it was first discussed. 

I think there’s another layer on top of that though, a different war between generations. There’s something big shifting in 1963 society, heralded by The Beatles, and Dr Who will soon have to decide if it’s on the side of the youth or their parents. Uniquely, it’s both. I put it to you a lot of times in these reviews, dear reader, that as pretty much the only programme in the 1960s designed for parents and children to watch together Dr Who is in an unusual position as a sort of dialogue between two different ways of life. On the one hand you have the Daleks, the generation of war who’ll fight as a way of life because it’s how they’ve been trained. We don’t know how old they are but the hint is that they’ve been in their cases a long time. Up against them you have the Thals, the beautiful people who are the Aryan ideal, all blonde-haired and blue eyes. They even get through the day by taking drugs – anti-radiation drugs admittedly, but note how it makes them thrive while they make their Dalek ‘parents’ ill. It’s a bit early for hippies to be around yet but they’re very much the peaceniks who absolutely were around in 1963, the sort of hip young things who walked around protesting the atom bomb and resented being conscripted into wars in Korea and Vietnam just because their elders were getting edgy over what Russia was up to. They even dress the way adults thought youngsters dressed: weirdly, with cuts up the side of leather trousers and cloaks that left them bare-chested for the men and an absolute gonzo design for the one token Thal woman we see. For the longest time Terry sides with the Thals who come in peace and try to negotiate with the Daleks even after being blown up, but Terry is no hippie idealist; he’s also scared of what Russia will do to the Western world if the youngsters grow up refusing to fight. The scene in the middle where Ian manipulates the Thals into fighting, by stealing their civilisation’s history and then that token girl Dyoni, to make them fight feels like nation offering up another warning to the generation about to come of age in the 1960s: that peace only works if both sides genuinely want it. And he sees no evidence that they do. (That said I’m not sure I personally agree, especially the way it’s handled here. As much as it fits the theme of the story (this is a very British version of WW2, down to the Tardis crew wondering when the impossibly good looking Americans were going to stop talking about doing stuff and help out) it really doesn’t fit with the future ethos of Dr Who, that war is something baddies cause and goodies avoid like the space plague. After all The Thals are victims of a nuclear war too - it seems fair enough to me they don’t want to fight and risk extinction after barely recovering down the centuries and the odds of defeating The Daleks aren’t exactly stacked in their favour. Ian’s smug comment ‘oho, so there is something you’ll fight for then?’ is the only time you want to slap him during his time in the Tardis. Then again you’ll spend most of this story wanting to slap the Dr and Susan both, who are at their bitchy and cry-baby worst too). 

To his credit, though, Nation is ambiguous: war might be an inevitable necessary evil in so many ways, but it’s still an evil, with the Doctor’s talk of telling the Thals not to glamorise war and remind people fo those who are not coming back a hugely powerful speech. So much so that by the end you still don’t quite know which side of the fence this series comes down on. To an extent, then, ‘The Daleks’ feels like Nation trying to convince himself that war is necessary and if not that humans can overcome it with a lasting peace. And all his other stories suggests that he never quite convinces himself man can. All of Nation’s future Dalek stories will build on this to an extent: ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ is what might have happened if the Nazis really had invaded Britain as Terry so feared from his bunker, ‘The Chase’ is the warmongers feeling more and more out of touch in the more liberated 1960s, ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ the fears that the United Nations won’t be enough to stop any future Hitler-style tyrant from gaining power and ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ a sort of view of Germany in the 1930s that allowed Hitler to rise to power in the first place. All you need to know for this story, though, is that for a lot of first-time viewers it hit a lot differently in 1963-64 than it would have done for anyone who grew up after the cold war when this story wasn’t just one of many possible futures but arguably the most likely future, at any rate as feared by most people watching. 

This is a tightly plotted story too, not least because Terry’s got a better offer and whips these scripts out at the rate of an episode a day so he can get on with more interesting things. While the ‘rescue’ bit in the second half descends into ‘B movie territory’ there had been nothing ever made like the first half. After all it wasn’t the first appearance of the Dalek itself that got people talking through word-of-mouth so much as the first episode cliffhanger (still my favourite Dr Who cliffhanger of them all), when after 25 minutes of exploring our first alien world (eerie, silent and deadly, emaciated by radiation) the Tardis crew come across a colossal city and wonder what great technological wonder might be inside, before Barbara gets separated and first sees...them, screaming at something just off-camera (but which looks suspiciously like a sink plunger);you can tell I think that this episode is a re-mount recorded in between episodes three and four due to talkback from the studio being recorded on the soundtrack – everyone’s much more comfortable and confident with what they’re doing than they are in episode two, having seen the Daleks physically on screen. It’s the intrigue that got people tuning in even before The Daleks were on screen properly (although it’s a myth that the viewing figures went up straight away - they actually dipped a little for part two before climbing across the next coupe of episodes), helped by that first atmospheric episode with its Cusick-designed acid swamps and a city plainly built for a very different race (its a masterstroke that only Susan is small enough to walk through the corridors without stooping in a world built by an alien race who didn’t ever expect humanoids to end up in their city). The rest of the story then pulls the same trick in reverse, building up The Daleks’ hatred of their ugly mutant Thal rivals. Only to find they’re blonde and good looking pacifists, the traditional human view of ‘beauty’. 

Since then, of course, it’s been a slightly different story. The cold war no longer hangs over us the way it once did, with war still a possibility but one that looks as if it will breakout in an entirely different way (when the Cybermen and Sontaron-like opportunistic terrorists or the eccentric millionaires gone wrong like Lumic or even Davros seem a more plausible threat).Over the years this story’s reputation has slipped slightly. People have complained that this story is too slow – which it is, but far less so than most 1960s TV (it’s more action-packed than, say, ‘The Sensorites’ or ‘The Reign Of Terror’ from this same season for instance while I still say there’s a lot more going on in this story than any 13th Doctor episode). Some people complain that this story is ‘about’ The Daleks without the metal meanies actually doing anything except exist, which is also unfair: when you have a threat this big you don’t need to do anymore than threaten with the odd extermination and nobody working on this story had any idea that The Daleks would be back (it was Dr Who policy not to have any returning monsters, something they blew as early as the start of season two because The Daleks were simply too good not to have back again – they are, after all, exterminated quite thoroughly at the end here, however much we like to pretend they’re not; so sure of this were the BBC that Verity Lambert even gave two of the four Dalek props away to Barnado’s children’s home when they wrote in asking for them). 

 

People have rubbished the dialogue, but that’s not fair either: we’ve said a few times already that Terry Nation is one of those writers whose only as good as his script editor: he relies, more than most writers, on people interpreting his words to get the most out of them and ‘filling’ between the lines with companion ‘stuff’ while he gets on with telling an action story. David Whittaker is, in so many ways, Nations’ opposite (the Thal to his Dalek?): he loves dialogue and character and getting lost inside worlds and isn’t all that interested in plot, more the characters driving it. The fact that Nation has only sketched this world in is perfect for Whittaker, giving him the space to fill in the gaps, while in contrast Whittaker’s own scripts when left alone can be a bit ‘talky’ – Nation’s scripts throws so much jeopardy in there that this story results in being the best of both. Whittaker deserves a lot of the credit for The Daleks too and if anything understands how to write for them even better than their creator (no, not Davros, Terry): two of the best future Dr Who stories and much of the Dalek comic strip in TV Century 21 are his and show that he ‘got’ the Daleks in ways that terry could only dream of. There are lots of great moments here not just for the Daleks but for the regulars, who are involved in a mini civil war of their own, trying to learn to work together despite being (for now) natural enemies (just note the way the Doctor’s curiosity in the Dalek city overpowers his responsibility for keeping the others, even his grand-daughter safe; a fatal flaw he’ll still be paying for come future stories like ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ and ‘End Of Time’ but a fascinating flawed character point which oh so many writers seem to forget to use). Oddly enough they seem to be a bigger threat to each other than the Daleks (it’s odd for modern fans to see the Doctor stumble across the Daleks and apparently not knowing who they are – though note that he’s delirious when the others start discussing who they might be, so never actually comes out and days ‘who are the Metaltron dudes, bit weird aren’t they?’ For all we know he realises they’re the timelords’ mortal enemy but doesn’t want to let his fellow travellers know – not least because, for reasons we never discover, he’s busy keeping his species from his companions to. Of course, this is all just ret-conning to cover the fact that in 1963 the Daleks weren’t any of these things yet and weren’t expected to appear past this story). 

A bigger problem than any of these is that, after throwing so many new things at us in the first half, this story rather runs out of steam by episode five and basically re-introduces things to us all over again without quite the same frisson of excitement, just a cute looking baby crocodile, Dr Who’s first wobbly monster – a mutated creature that lives in the lake and a cliff that doesn’t seem to scary at all (there’s no paperwork suggesting it, but I’ve often wondered if this story was commissioned as a four-parter and expanded to seven when other stories fell through – other than making the Dr out to be a right clodpole, there’s no reason within the story he has to lose the fluid link that powers the Tardis so everyone has to trudge back into the city again; I’m old enough to have owned this back when the story was split at this point between two VHSes. I played the first one so much it broke, but barely got the second out of its box. Although we do know that this story was a six parter Verity requested be bumped up to a seven). This is also another of those unfortunate candidates as Dr Who’s most ‘sexist’ story. It took David Whittaker to point out that Terry Nation had no female characters beyond Barbara and Susan and wondered how The Thals had survived at all if they were all blokes. Nation sheepishly wrote Dyoni in but she has few lines and spends most of her time petrified out of her wits, hanging on to hunky blokes. Much the same thing is happening to Susan in this story and even Barbara is less the crusading practical history teacher of other stories than just someone to get into trouble and scream. They really haven’t worked out her character yet, nor the Doctor’s for that matter (this is one of the few scripts written in the belief that the show would run with the harsher more alien Dr of the pilot rather than the cuddlier re-write; he’s actually quite a git all round in this story, without the usual room for moments of Hartnell’s charm that even the other pre-rewrite stories ‘An Unearthly Child’ ‘Edge Of Destruction’ and ‘Marco Polo’ gave him). Only Ian is as he should be and even then the Daleks make him disabled for half the story so he can’t perform the action sequences he normally would (an oddity all round in retrospect: this is the only time the Daleks ever shoot to stun, not kill – and there’s no reason for it when they still have another three prisoners to tell them what they need to know). There are some truly awful effects, even by 1964 standards: Susan’s run through the forest is all too obviously the poor actress seriously re-thinking her contract as she’s hit with branches by stage-hands while running on the spot, while you’d think the Thals would have radiation rugs a bit more space agey than what looks suspiciously like a box of chocolates. The Thals are far less interesting than the Daleks; there’s a reason they’ve only been brought back once (in tenth anniversary sort-of special ‘Planet Of The Daleks’) while the Daleks themselves have come back thirty times or more. The only one with anything memorable to do is Alan Wheatley as Temmosus (an actor who’d been in ‘Brighton Rock’ alongside William Hartnell) and who for half the story behaves the way the Doctor will come to do – only they kill him off in episode four in a shock moment and he’s never sufficiently replaced. The ending is weak, especially after seven episodes of build up: everyone has a big battle and goes home. Still, the story had to end somewhere – outwitting evil through comradeship and the new trust between the Thals and team Tardis is a better solution than just pointing the sonic screwdriver at something (which doesn’t exist yet) and spouting something scientific. And did I mention slow? Other stories have taken the elements that this story created and done them far better. 

 Oh well. This wouldn’t be the first Terry Nation story that spends more time crafting the baddies than the regulars, it’s no slower or sexist than anything else being made in 1963 and it would be churlish to complain that a series that’s only just invented the wheel didn’t invent the turbo engine too. For a programme that the show’s two creators never wanted them to make it’s the sheer bravery and guts of everyone involved in this story, from producer Verity Lambert down, that impresses you most: there are no cut corners here, no compromises of vision, no attempt to talk down to the kiddies or dilute anything. This story is also a great follow-on from ‘A Unearthly Child’, looking at much the same themes of different tribes trying to get along (and failing) to the backdrop of war, but in a very different way that’s all its own. There are no problems that get in the way of this story and for one that’s so concerned with 1963 ideas and imagery (WW2, nuclear war, race) it’s all still impressively timeless, less dated than anything surviving from sixty years ago has a right to be. For half a story at least ‘The Daleks’ is every bit as iconic as reputation suggests, a story that’s hugely special, that re-writes the rules of television and bends every rule in the book without breaking them, while even the other half is still pretty darn good compared to any of this show’s contemporaries. While a lot of the ideas in this story were already staples of scifi novels (had he still been around and had this been the 21st century H G Wells would surely have sued over the similarities with his story ‘The Time Machine’, with the Daleks as the war-like Morloks and the Thals as the more peace-loving Eloi) but few of the audience watching would have read scifi books or magazines: Dr Who was for general telly fans, not a cult audience with specialist interests. For a majority of people watching first time around this is all new, especially the children’s half of audience, and like many a new experience it’s seared in the memory long after other and often better versions of the same idea come along. We are so lucky and privileged to even still have it, given how many other Dr Who stories from this same time were lost and how close this story too came to extermination in the great BBC archive-wiping of the 1970s. As hated as he is by the fanbase for all sorts of different reasons (some fair, some not) this story wouldn’t exist anymore without Ian Levine, who went through the BBC archives in 1978 long before fans of other shows thought to do this and saved the positive and negative film cans the very week they were due to be wiped. A world without this story in it would be utterly unthinkable. ‘The Daleks’ isn’t just a special part of Dr Who, it’s a special part of British TV. While there have been better Dalek stories down the years, they all owe a lot to this one, as does every single episode of Dr Who to come, a story that’s still every bit as creepy, clever and gripping as you’d hope. 

Or at least it is in black-and-white. For some odd reason Russell T Davies commissioned a special re-edited colourised version of the story to go out the actual night of the show’s 60th anniversary as an introduction for newer fans discovering all the old stories for the first time on the ‘Whoniverse’ home on BBC i-player (I do wonder if he planned to just have the whole of first story ‘An Unearthly Child’ colourised before writer Anthony Coburn’s estate got stroppy). It’s an odd move: there is, indeed, a terrific 75 minute edit to be made of this show: but this isn’t it. Instead of removing the second half of the story where not much happens beyond low budget monsters and cliched scares we get whole chunks of dialogue removed: the bits written by David Whittaker that you might not need to follow the plot but which you do need to understand the characters. The editing makes the Doctor seem weak and feeble rather than a sharp-minded alien in rail body, Ian impossibly gung-ho rather than a man faced with an impossible situation and Barbara a non-playable character; only Susan comes out of this edit better, with less whining and moping. They even take out the Doctor’s be wary of war’ speech out and keep in the one about being a ‘pioneer at home before I got too old’ speech which – understandably given they haven’t worked out who the Doctor is yet – contradicts everything to come and so I could have forgiven them for removing. The editing is haphazard too, jump-cutting from one scene to another in a breathless rush: the original had a lot of problems but pacing was definitely not one of them. Ironically the colourful dialogue means this is the least colourful version of this much re-told story around. As for the colour itself, it spectacularly misses the fact that for everyone involved the clothes and make-up they were wearing was designed for monochrome television. There’s no way a teacher as sensible as Barbara would really be in a pink cardigan, for instance, except to make it look grey when compared to Susan's pure white top. The actors all come with heavy makeup too, so that they look the ‘right’ shade under the camera lights in black and white, but it just makes them look like painted clown when presented as ‘real’. Mark Ayres creates a new musical score to cover the cracks, which removes all the good stuff from Tristram Carey’s score and the radiophonic Workshop’s impressive array of sound effects and replaces them with a sub ‘Murray God’ type score, complete with orchestras and choirs that seem totally out of place (there’s a moment, when Ian is pretending to be a Dalek and is inside the casing, that sounds like a modern percussion-heavy pop song which is just so so wrong). Far from regenerating the story it’s never been harder to follow or seemed more pointless and feels like the desecration of an old friend: anyone who knows this story well just complains about all their favourite bits going missing and anyone who doesn’t will be struck by how incompetent and hard-to-follow everything is. Yes I accept the argument that its’ an addition to the original rather than a replacement, but honestly which newcomer put off by this story in colour is going to try it in black-and-white? Which the original sort of was too in places but in a more natural, organic way. Having this at the start of the i-player, as the natural place for newbies to start, just makes my blood boil and one of the dumbest ideas anyone connected with this show ever had. That said, the clips at the end of the episode look amazing (particularly ‘The Web Planet’ and ‘The Gunfighters’) so I might not be too put out if they make some more… 

POSITIVES +That said, I bet this is one of those stories that would seem magic even if all we had was the soundtrack and a bunch of telesnap photos, like so many other 1st Doctor stories. As well as the Dalek voices The Radiophonic Workshop’s ‘special sounds’ wrangler Brian Hodgson and musician Tristram Carey (not that this is anything like any music ever heard before on TV ever) create an alien sound that’s every bit as original as the Dalek design, a sort of fairground ride turned evil, mechanical and ominous, the perfect accompaniment to an alien jungle ravaged by nuclear war. The sound was so popular it was recycled in many many Dalek stories to come, especially those set like this one on Skaro and I miss it whenever the modern series ‘forgets’ to use it.

 NEGATIVES - The mutant swamp monster is clearly a stretch to the budget too far. He’s too cute for one thing, a sort of cybermat-armadillo hybrid with big bug eyes (please don’t tell Sydney Newman…) and the sort of thing that in another year Vicki would be taking home to the Tardis to keep as a pet and give a cute name to, not the sort of thing that sends our intrepid heroes fleeing (I would totally buy a cuddly one and it’s about the only Dr Who toy we haven’t had yet. Just saying). Worse is that we don’t really need it, what with all the killer trees and acid rain providing lots of peril already – it’s perhaps Dr Who’s first example of the ‘artificial cliffhanger’, there to end the episode with a bit of action designed to make you tune in next week to see how they can possibly get out of that then...only to find they do, with ease, about a minute in. There will be many many many more examples of this in the years to come, the one legacy of ‘The Daleks’ that’s as toxic as its aliens.

 

BEST QUOTES: Temmosus ‘I've never struggled against the inevitable, it's a vain occupation. But I should always advise you to examine very closely what you think to be inevitable. It's surprising how often apparent defeat can be turned to victory’. 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: This story was the very first novelisation with the snappy title ‘Dr Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks’ by David Whittaker, published the month that the show’s second season started just before this story’s first birthday. Fondly remembered by many, it’s only briefly been out of print and is the most re-printed Who novel of them all, the only one available to every generation of fan and which particularly, for anyone who became a fan somewhere between February 1964 and the video release in 1989, is the version of the show’s origins they knew first. Because this was the second story Whittaker had to introduce the characters fresh and adds a wildly different opening three chapters told from Ian’s point of view. He’s not a teacher in this story at all but a wannabe scientist whose just attended a failed job interview when he stumbles across a car crash on Barnes common (somewhere vaguely near Putney, London). Helping a semi-conscious Barbara, who he’s never met before, he learns that she was chasing after a schoolgirl named Susan who disappears, encountering the Doctor and stumbling into his Tardis in much the same way as ‘An Unearthly Child’ but in a very different location and circumstances and from a very personal point of view (generally the Target novelisations are told in the third person; from here on in the story follows ‘The Daleks’ in much the same way to the end). 

 ‘Return To Skaro’ (2020), part of the fourth box set of ‘The First Doctor Adventures’, is a surprisingly late direct sequel from Big Finish, written by Andrew Smith (who, aged nineteen, was the youngest writer on the show when ‘Full Circle’ went out forty years earlier). A fan from the earliest days, his love for this era shines through in a script that really captures the essence of the original story and fills in on what the Thals have been up ton Skaro since the events of this story, following yet another near-disaster using the ‘fast return switch’ from ‘Edge Of Destruction’. Skaro seems peaceful and there’s even plant-life returning to its scarred surface, but exploring the Dalek city our heroes accidentally set off a hidden chamber where a few last Daleks have been in hiding waiting for revenge. It’s the performances, using the cast from the docudrama ‘An Adventure In Time and Space’, that don’t quite cut it: worthy as David Bradley was a Hartnell clone for an hour in a drama, for an entire story you just find yourself wishing for the original, while the rest of the regulars aren’t even further away from the originals. It’s a shame they didn’t make this a ‘Companion Chronicles’ with William Russell reading it out as Ian, then it would have been one of the best releases in the range. 

 ‘Masters Of War’ (2008) is a less obvious sequel, part of Big Finish’s ‘Unbound’ series featuring Doctor Who regenerations as they ‘might have been’. While David Warner is a fair Hartnell substitute and it’s good fun to hear him with the Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney as excellent as ever) it’s still a bit much to get my head round this being a ‘parallel universe’ Doctor, given that there are so many of the real things running around as it is (even if you think of these Unbound Doctors as pre-Hartnell ‘Timeless Child’ Doctors it’s a very odd concept). However this particular script is of real interest as it features a plot based on terry Nation’s original panned ending for ‘The Daleks’, dropped for reasons of time and budget. Initially there was going to be a third race on Skaro, The Quatch, revealed at the end, who’d started the war between the Daleks and Thals and who now bitterly regretted it, having discovered the joys of peace and harmony. While far more in keeping with the more usual Dr Who ethos as a child of the 1960s that believes in peace and kindness it would have been a rather clumsy end to the original story if made. Interesting to hear though and having this parallel ending in the parallel series’ second story is a great place to put it! 

 You can also see, of course, the first ever film adaptation of a Dr Who story ‘Dr Who and The Daleks’, released about a year after this story and featuring peter Cushing as the Doctor with Roy Castle as Ian (although, given his clumsiness, really he’s more like Harry will be) and Jennie Linden as Barbara, who all muddle through in approximations of the characters we know and love without being anywhere near as good. The one exception is Robert Tovey, who really was a teenager when she played Susan and she’s a lot less wet all round, with the others stopping her from getting into trouble instead! The big thrill at the time was to see The Daleks in colour rather than black and white and with a big budget that did things they couldn’t possibly do on TV. The result always felt a bit hollow to me though: The Daleks were designed to work on black and white TVs for a start and lose a bit of their creepiness in technicolours, while for all the bigger explosions this film doesn’t do anything better than the original and with far less heart somehow. Still, I can see why it was such a success back in the days of peak ‘Dalekmania’: in the days when you had about as much chance of seeing the TV stories again than you did travelling space and time you could return to see this film as many times at the cinema as you were prepared to pay for. And they kept re-issuing it, with a TV premiere as late as the 1971 (in the middle of ‘Colony In Space’ in fact). 

 Previous ‘An Unearthly Child’ next ‘The Edge Of Destruction’