002 - The Daleks

Broadcast:

21^st December 1963 - 1^st February 1964

Doctor:

William Hartnell

Companions:

Ian, Barbara, Susan

Adversary:

Daleks

Written by:

Terry Nation

Director:

Christopher Barry, Richard Martin

Music:

Tristram Cary

Script Editor:

David Whitaker

Producer:

Verity Lambert

Average Viewers:

8.97m (6.9, 6.4, 8.9, 9.9, 9.9, 10.4, 10.4)

Summary: A petrified forest, pacifist farmers and mutants determined to wipe them out. A post apocalyptic tale where nuclear threat is still a reality. The travellers find themselves stuck on a radiation soaked planet, captured by one faction and determined to help the other.

Doctor Who has gained reasonable interest so far and while the world has come to terms with the loss of JFK the Cold War is very much still weighing it down. As 1963 draws to a close The Beatles are still at No. 1 with "I Want To Hold Your Hand" followed by "Glad All Over" (Dave Clark Five) and "Needles And Pins" (Searchers). At the cinema are It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Pink Panther. On television, satirical comedy show That Was the Week That Was came to an end after two years (to avoid any clashes with the coming years general election), and Top Of The Pops was broadcast for the first time and would run for 42 years. Sticking with music television, viewers who stayed with BBC Television after episode 5 of The Daleks would have seen Carole Anne Ford on the panel of Jukebox Jury!

Audiences didn't know it, but they were about to meet the most enduring adversaries the Doctor would ever face. Even as the second episode was broadcast and the Daleks made their first appearance the BBC's Head Of Drama, Sydney Newman, still wasn't convinced - Verity Lambert had assured him that there really was no choice but to use them and their story because nothing else was ready. It wouldn't be long before he graciously admitted to being wrong and the shows future was assured by the huge success of this story...

It's worth noting that the title The Daleks was not given to this adventure until some years later and was only made official when it was released on VHS in the 1980s (at which point it could not be released again under a different title so "The Daleks" was effectively set in stone) It is generally accepted that the working title was "The Mutants" but until May 1966 each episode was individually named and there were no umbrella titles for adventure. This lead to novelisations and references over the years using all sorts of variations. Today, of course, when we see a title with "Dalek" in it, we know what to expect but even if it had been there in 1963 it would not have meant anything. It's also worth noting that Daleks didn't feature in any of the episode titles either, until part two of The Dalek Invasion Of Earth (as we now refer to it) which was simply called "The Daleks", and despite several other appearances, it wouldn't be until Day Of The Daleks in 1972 that it happened again. Following that, every Dalek story would feature them in the title, thus ensuring a good number of viewers but removing any kind of suspense and intrigue hitherto employed.

The first episode kicks things off after the brief recap with a curious bas relief video effect, presumably to hint at the petrified nature of the scene before it is stated outright that all the trees are made of stone. Curiously, there is a breeze that is never mentioned or featured again. It would have been deliberate in the studio and is mentioned in the script but I'm unable to explain why, it seems a needless detail for just one line. Much more importantly, we get the first inkling that the Doctor may not be able to get Ian and Barbara home and we get to see new rooms in the TARDIS as well as a food machine and the Doctor opens up a panel under the main console for the first time - on this occasion it's to remove he "fluid link" to feign a problem that will enable him to investigate an abandoned city that they have seen. He later comes clean when he realises they are all in danger of radiation sickness but they can't just leave because Barbara is missing. Indeed, Barbara has had the first encounter with the Daleks that lead to the first episode's cliffhanger as she was menaced by a sink plunger! A curious anomaly that viewers wouldn't have noticed in 1963 is that the recap of this cliffhanger is neither a re-enactment nor the previous week's action played in. It is in fact a previous version before the first episode could be rerecorded (technical problems lead to the first recording being scrapped but it wouldn't be remounted until a few weeks after episode two was recorded, thus the original cliffhanger had to be used in the recap) The first full sighting of a Dalek, indeed four of them, doesn't come until nearly five minutes into the second episode and the now familiar pulsing hum of Dalek technology isn't heard until nearly four minutes after that. Its then a further three minutes before the word "Dalek" is first used. Even more surprising to a retrospective viewer, the first shot fired by a Dalek merely paralyses Ian's legs as a warning and there is no mention of extermination until fourteen minutes into episode three. Further more, that first use is a simple statement referring to "extermination" and throughout the rest of the serial there are merely two utterances of "exterminated" and two of "extermination" The now famous cry of "Exterminate! Exterminate!" will not be heard for some time yet.

There are some great Dalek moments. Susan writes a message for the Thals which the Daleks then read - one takes the message with a magnet in it's sucker, then turns for another Dalek to read it! There are sick Daleks, a Dalek with vision impaired by mud, the creature from inside the casing is seen as the episode three cliffhanger, Ian rides inside a Dalek and more surprisingly there is a moment when a door refuses to open and the Dalek is clearly bewildered - hard to imagine, but some delightfully cute acting from the operator! On the downside of course is the use of photographic blow-ups used to swell the Dalek population (that's cardboard cut-outs to the uninitiated!)

So the Daleks are great and the story is quite intricate with a mix of action, adventure, capture and caper. Sadly the Thals let the story down. They are by design pretty insipid but they are given more scenes and more lines than is comfortable and they do tend to drag on and slow the pace right down. This is not helped by the fact that during development Terry Nation was asked to extend the serial from six episodes to seven and as a consequence, more time is spent on the process of getting the Thals into the Dalek city (via the swamp and mountain caves). They aren't all bad scenes and do make for a nice quest/adventure but it drags the story away from its roots and the reasoning doesn't quite pay off. Also, the Daleks are defeated by 16 minutes into the final episode leading to nearly four minutes of padding and it still comes in short of the normal running time.

On the positive side, there is a very good action sequence with fast cutting which would normally have been done on film to make editing easier (rather than cut live in the video studio as this was), there are some false perspective corridors which mostly work OK appart from shadows falling on them, the model city is very good (when the first episode had to be remade, the opportunity was taken to improve a previously unsatisfactory model) and there are numerous inlay effects that work very well, especially the Dalek's lift which doesn't actually move. Some of the shots inside the lift-shaft are a little confusing though - due to the camera angle the first shot gives the impression that the lift is going down rather then up. Keeping with the slightly negative, there is a less than convincing scene in which the Doctor shorts out an electrical panel with devastating affects for the Daleks... not only is the narrative unclear but the effects flash-charge goes off a little too early and there is possibly a line fluff from William Hartnell as a result. Speaking of fluffs, although the two occurrences of the Doctor getting Ian's name wrong (Chesterfield and Chesterman) were deliberate, I counted a total of six verbal slips. Three were minor stumbles but the bigger ones include the utterance of "anti-radiation gloves" quickly corrected to "drugs" and it was this which Mark Gatiss chose to include in An Adventure In Space And Time, though it was paraphrased and shifted to a different scene - a curious case of dramatic licence.

In terms of Doctor Who canon and lore, Susan explains that the TARDIS lock is not simple but comes away to reveal 21 further keyholes and using the wrong one will dissolve the rest! Barbara has a line that is now more familiar in a slightly different form as a self mocking 'catchphrase' "I have some experience in these corridors, they all look alike" and the Doctor leaves the Thals with the notion of being pioneers for their new life stating that he is "much too old to be a pioneer, although I was once, among my own people"

A final light hearted point of interest to end this review (having scored The Daleks with 76%, dragged down by those Thal scenes and very limited music which doesn't help) actor Dinsdale Laden was originally cast as Ganatus in this second serial but had to pull out due to the rescheduling to remount the first episode... he would eventually appear in the series as Dr Judson in The Curse Of Fenric, the second to last serial before the show was taken off air!