Timeless Adventures (8 page)

A memo from the Head of Business for Television Enterprises to Sydney Newman, dated 20 February 1964, raised the possibility of commercial exploitation of
Doctor Who
. Specifically, the memo asked how long the series was intended to run and whether there were any plans for the return of the popular Daleks. Head of Serials Donald Wilson replied with the welcome news that the BBC was committed to at least 52 weeks of
Doctor Who
and said, ‘We have in mind, of course, to try and resurrect the Daleks. I am asking Verity Lambert to keep you informed of any possible exploitation ideas, including the return of the Daleks.’

Just under one month later, series script editor David Whitaker commissioned writer Terry Nation to script a second Dalek adventure, under the working title
The Return of the Daleks
. The ratings and popular success of the Daleks was very clear to the BBC, so much so that, in April 1964, David Whitaker recommended that Terry Nation should become the senior writer on the show, contributing three serials for the show’s second season. ‘He has worked very well for us,’ wrote Whitaker understatedly in an internal memo. ‘His figures [ratings] are certainly the highest so far of all the writers.’

By mid-April the first stirrings of what would become known as ‘Dalekmania’ were beginning to be felt as products and merchandise proposals began to reach the BBC from interested manufacturers. First to be approved were novelisations of televised adventures, starting with the first Dalek story (under the unwieldy title
Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks
) and the official
The Dalek Book
, an annual for Christmas 1964, nicely timed for the broadcast of the sequel serial.

Nation delivered his second Dalek adventure under the new title of
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
. The serial would be the first time that
Doctor Who
made an alien invasion of Earth central to a story, but it would be a format used with some regularity thereafter. Much of the serial was shot on location in and around a variety of London landmarks, another first for the show. Nation’s conceit was to take his recent memories of France under occupation in wartime and use it for the background of a twenty-second-century-set tale of intergalactic conquest. When the Doctor and his friends arrive in this London of the future, it looks like the city during the Blitz (another fresh memory for many), as the Daleks have already arrived, conquered and destroyed. Nation’s scripts reinforced the initial concept of the Daleks as space fascists by directly paralleling them with a British audience’s image of the Nazis. The Daleks begin to use their ‘exterminate’ catchphrase (heard in school playgrounds across the nation). They even talk of implementing a ‘final solution’ and are seen (in location shots at London landmarks) to be making fascist salutes with their plungers! Their plan – to mine the planet’s core and navigate it around the galaxy – involves the use of slave labour in camps. Terry Nation was never accused of subtlety.

Viewers of mid-1960s
Doctor Who
had likely been evacuated as children during the Second World War and returned to discover wrecked cities and devastated communities. Children being children, such destruction provided the greatest playgrounds they’d ever seen (see the Ealing film
Hue and Cry
, shot in 1947 on locations still showing the scars of wartime). Twenty years later, and perhaps with children of their own, they’d find Terry Nation’s
Doctor Who
episodes evoking memories of their formative years. This wasn’t the ‘domestic catastrophe’ of John Wyndham’s fiction, in which alien threats (intelligent plants in
The Day of the Triffids
) are brought to bear on everyday locations.
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
presented a much broader canvas (the dialogue alludes to entire continents wiped out by the Daleks), although one brought to audiences in their own homes through the still relatively new domestic medium of television. This historical context helped to make the fantasy real to an audience who saw a city they recognised invaded by their new favourite television bogeymen. This is emphasised even more by the fact that, despite being set in 2167, this future Earth looks remarkably contemporary.

The popular myth of Britain in wartime was one of stoical resistance and D-Day-style bravery overcoming the evils of Nazism.
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
would be worrying to the audience as it took historical certainty and turned it on its head. What if Britain had come under Nazi rule (explored in another Ealing movie,
Went the Day Well
in 1942, in which disguised Nazis infiltrate an English village)? The result may have looked something like the scenes on
Doctor Who
.

Beyond using wartime iconography for an easy hit of recognition, Nation had also provided (whether he realised it or not) a handy metaphor in his second Dalek serial for the state of Britain in the mid-1960s. Post-colonial and post-Empire, the country was not perceived to be the same one that ‘won the war’ so successfully, especially following the 1956 Suez crisis that had culminated in the resignation of discredited Prime Minister Anthony Eden. Britain was economically and socially defeated by this time. Yet in the middle of the decade, with the election of the new Wilson government, there were the seeds of a new-found optimism, like that expressed by the characters when the Dalek threat is neutralised. The country may have been in a dreadful state, but the possibility of rebirth existed. It was, indeed, a time of ‘white heat’. There was something in the air, and the viewers of
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
felt it too. Soon London would be swinging, and if they didn’t take part in it, their children surely would. A new world was coming, it was being built all around them and, on screen,
Doctor Who
was showing exactly what it might be like.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth
was the final story of 1964 and brought Doctor Who full circle, right back to HG Wells. This time the source novel wasn’t
The Time Machine
, which had inspired the series’ initial time-travel premise, but
The War of the Worlds
, which provided the aliens-invade-England template for so many of the
Doctor Who
adventures. Wells’ conceit had been to look at things from the point of view of those countries that had been invaded and occupied by Britain during the forging of the Empire. As a result, his invaders devastate ordinary places like Weybridge and Shepperton, with calamitous events set in Woking, Putney and Chertsey, bringing the horror of war (long before the world wars of the twentieth century) home to readers.

The final episode of
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
attracted 12.4 million viewers. Many of them watched the episode clutching something Dalek-shaped received from Father Christmas the previous day. The return of the Daleks launched the era of ‘Dalekmania’. Their original popularity had taken the BBC by surprise. Unlike today’s franchise exploitation of
Doctor Who
, no one had thought of producing tie-in merchandise like toys and books until after the Daleks proved so popular.

Far from being the figures of fear intended by Terry Nation and the
Doctor Who
production team, the Daleks became favourites of 1960s children. Just in time for their return in the run up to Christmas 1964, shops in Britain were full to bursting with Dalek-related items, from badges to confectionery, from dressing-up costumes to ice-lolly cards, from comics to a variety of models and toys.

Naturally, all this interest meant that the Daleks would return to
Doctor Who
again and again, often overshadowing the series’ title character. From 1965 to 1967, the Daleks returned roughly every six months (with a break in the summer of 1966), keeping children and toy manufacturers alike happy.

It could be argued that the runaway popularity of the Daleks had the effect of neutering them as serious adversaries. During their original appearance, Ian had clambered inside a Dalek casing as part of a narrative strategy to explain exactly what these creatures were and how they operated. Following
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
, the next time a Dalek appeared on screen it was played for laughs in the disposable adventure
The Space Museum
(April–May 1965). One of the exhibits in the museum is an empty Dalek casing, within which the Doctor hides, only to make fun of the Daleks by imitating one. He’s acting exactly like the watching children, who’d been playing in upturned dustbins since early 1964, shouting ‘Exterminate’. This neutering rather devalued the Daleks as a threat, a trend that was to continue in the next comic story,
The Chase
(May–June 1965).

For his third Dalek story, creator Terry Nation reverted to his serial style. Six months after the outbreak of ‘Dalekmania’, the Daleks were back, engaged in a chase through the cosmos after the Doctor. Nation gave the Daleks their own space-time ship (almost exactly, but not quite, like the Doctor’s own TARDIS). Each individual episode of the six-part story saw the Daleks arrive at a different time and place in an attempt to catch up with the Doctor, including the desert planet of Aridius, a haunted-house theme park on a futuristic Earth, the top of the Empire State Building, the
Mary Celeste
in 1872 (the Daleks exterminate the crew, solving a long-standing, child-fascinating mystery) and the planet Mechanus where the Daleks engage in a battle for survival with robotic enemies, the Mechanoids. In an attempt to engineer another Dalek-like merchandising craze, the production team created the large, squat, hexagonal Mechanoids, echoing the Daleks with their mechanical voices and habit of zapping anyone who comes near. Despite the availability of some limited Mechanoid merchandise, they never caught on and did not return to the show (although they did have a rematch with the Daleks in the pages of the spin-off Dalek comic strip in
TV21
comic).

Much of
The Chase
is played for laughs, often at the expense of the Daleks. In a memo to director Richard Martin, producer Verity Lambert noted of the script: ‘…it is slightly tongue-in-cheek and obviously is purely an adventure story, but… there are lots of opportunities for imagination and excitement.’
The Chase
made the Daleks more child-friendly, but that’s not what the children of Britain had responded to. They wanted the Daleks to be nasty, and their next serial would go some way to restoring that reputation.

The Chase
also brought the most significant cast changes in the show’s two-year history to date. Carole Ann Ford had left in
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
, with Susan replaced by Vicki (Maureen O’Brien), a space-age (though still very 1960s) teenager who was rescued by the Doctor. Now, Ian and Barbara are presented with the means (the captured Dalek time machine) to return home. A montage sequence sees them happily back on Earth, while the Doctor travels on with Vicki and astronaut Steven Taylor (Peter Purves), picked up after the defeat of the Daleks and the Mechanoids. However, the most significant cast change in
Doctor Who
’s history was just over a year away.

When the Daleks returned in
The Daleks’ Master Plan
(November 1965–January 1966), they were taken more seriously, and were on air for a longer period than ever before. Originally planned as a sixepisode serial,
The Daleks’ Master Plan
was doubled to 12 episodes, supposedly at the suggestion of BBC Controller of Programmes (Television) Huw Weldon, on the grounds that his mother was a huge fan. The actual instruction came from Head of Serials Gerald Savory during the production of
The Chase
in July 1965 and was responded to favourably in a memo from Lambert, although she was concerned about keeping the cost of such an ambitious epic serial manageable.

The Daleks’ Master Plan
began as a magnificent space opera (distinct from the usual chapter-play serial hi-jinks), with the Daleks presiding over an uneasy alliance of various space powers out to conquer the galaxy. Set in AD 4000, the show sees Earth as part of a galactic federation, protected by the Space Security Service and represented by the Guardian of the Solar System, Mavic Chen (Kevin Stoney). Chen is secretly in league with the Daleks, and only the Doctor and his friends can disrupt their plans for galactic domination. This involves stealing a vital component of the Daleks’ ultimate weapon, the Time Destructor. The rest of the 12 episodes play out as a more serious re-run of
The Chase
. The story features the death of not one, but two of the Doctor’s newest travelling companions: Trojan slave girl Katarina (played by Adrienne Hill, who joined the TARDIS crew at the end of the previous tale,
The Myth Makers
) and Space Security agent Sara Kingdom (Jean Marsh), aged to death at the climax when the Time Destructor is activated. This was harrowing stuff for the Saturday tea-time audience, and reinstated the Daleks as a serious threat, responsible for death and destruction on a grand scale. The serial attracted an average of around 9.5 million viewers, many snared by a single-episode prelude story broadcast five weeks before and featuring the exploits of the Space Security Service, but none of the regular
Doctor Who
cast.

At the time
The Chase
was completing production in June 1965, a different side of the Daleks was about to be seen by the nation’s children. The latest result of ‘Dalekmania’ was arriving: the malevolent pepper pots were about to be unleashed at the cinema, this time in glorious colour.

Two B-movies were produced by British-based film company Amicus and released under the Aaru banner of co-financier Joe Vegoda. Amicus, set up in the UK by Americans Max J Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky, were rivals to Hammer Films and were quick to jump on the Dalek bandwagon, adapting the debut TV story for
Doctor Who and the
Daleks
(1965). Streamlined from seven 25-minute episodes (175 minutes) to a more cinema-friendly 82 minutes, the film dynamically retold the Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks.

This, however, was a very different Doctor. For the first time, an actor other than William Hartnell played the character (not including doubles for Hartnell on the TV show). Amicus and Hammer stalwart Peter Cushing played ‘Dr Who’, an eccentric Earth scientist (the TV Doctor’s origins were still shrouded in mystery) who appears to have constructed a multi-dimensional space-time machine in his backyard! With his granddaughter Susan (younger than on TV) and daughter Barbara and her boyfriend Ian, the Doctor is separated from the TARDIS on the mysterious planet Skaro. Aimed at a younger audience than the TV series,
Doctor Who and the Daleks
was a light and frothy adventure, fitting its colourful nature and the fact that it was released during the school summer holidays of 1965. The big draw was seeing the Daleks in action in colour, and seeing many more of them in one place than the TV series had yet shown.