Doctor Who - Documentary s10e15 Episode Script
Stripped for Action - The Daleks
At the time we started TV 21, the comic, I received an invitation from Terry Nation, who happened to be the man who created the Daleks.
I suppose the thing that attracted me to the Daleks was jealousy.
I was making films with puppets.
And if we wanted to make a robot, it was very, very difficult, if not impossible, to make a convincing robot, you know, with a puppet.
For a start off, they couldn't walk anywhere, how on earth would we be able to get them to walk like a robot? And then along came the Daleks.
Well, the Daleks were totally superior.
(BEEPING) TV Century 21, wasit was literally the Rolls-Royce of comics for the '60s generation.
I was, fortunately, too young to be a major reader of the Eagle or Look and Learn at the time, so, my first exposure to something that was markedly above what TV Comic had done with TV comic strips in the past was, with that sudden bombshell arrival of TV 21 in the bookstalls.
I think it was a rather wet and rainy Tuesday afternoon, if I can remember, seeing it in there for the first time and just being so totally blown away by not only the look of it, because it was so markedly different to a comic magazine, but also to the level of content.
One of the interesting things to note about The Daleks strips, is the Doctor never appears in these.
And, in fact, it's the Daleks who are very much the heroes of the strip.
And you find, as a reader, that when you see certain stories where the Daleks are actually in peril, that you're actually starting to worry about them.
It's a comic strip without, you know, a clear protagonist.
It's a comic strip without any remotely sympathetic figure in it, really.
But it's a comic strip that endures and captivates purely by the sheer force of imagination, I think, um, by showing us a side to these creatures which we're always denied on the television.
The Dalek strips kind of fit in to that, that thing about the '60s Doctor Who, which was before anyone had really thought about it enough.
I love that sort of magical time when there were no fans to tell you that another story had said one thing and you could only say It's from that mad world, where anything was possible, so you've got this origin story for the Daleks, which I think is just as relevant and just as chillinglywhatever you want, as the actual one we saw on telly.
BENTHAM: The idea being that a humanoid race on the planet of Skaro was in conflict with another race of humanoid creatures, the Thals, and, as a possible means of overcoming their oppressors or their opponents' technological superiority, they built these travel machines that were intended to be drone tanks for the Dal race or the Dalek race, however they were named.
It was quite a revelation to me to discover, and I think it was in the early '80s, that the What we thought of was the comic strip written by Terry Nation, 'cause that's how it was always credited on the front panels of TV Century 21, was, in fact, actually authored, I think it's right to say, at least 90% of the way through its run by David Whitaker.
HICKMAN: Whitaker's world of Daleks I mean, David Whitaker, apart from writing, in my opinion, the two best Dalek stories on telly, was sort of Just seemed never to escape them in the '60s.
He was always working on something about the Daleks.
Some annual, or some book, or a stage play, in one case.
I think if you look at some of the strips, you can see that You can see prototype versions of some of the ideas that Whitaker would use in his television scripts, The Power of The Daleks, and The Evil of The Daleks.
You can see a human collaborator in one of the stories, which is something that he'd build upon in Power and also there's a bizarre little story where some of the Daleks begin to develop human-like traits.
And that's something which is massively expanded upon in The Evil of The Daleks.
What gets underestimated with the Dalek comic strip is just how influential it was directly and indirectly on the TV series.
And, indeed, what we tend to know was of Dalek lore.
Terry Nation can see the idea of the Black Dalek or a Dalek Supreme as being the leader of the Dalek race, whereas David Whitaker quite early on put the Emperor firmly at the heart of the action.
And indeed, in one of the latter strips that it was done for, I think it was the last Dalek annual, The Dalek Outer Space Book, it even talked about the Emperor being rehoused in a larger static casing, which, of course, we then saw sometime in 1967 when The Evil of The Daleks was transmitted.
The most exciting Dalek there never was is the Golden Emperor Dalek.
If you You imagine a gold Dalek, and someone's blown up a very, very enormous beach ball, stuck it over his head.
He's got I think he's got 47 headlights around him and the tiniest little gun you ever did see.
He is, you now, he's sort of like the Mekon of the Daleks.
You know, huge brain, golden-brained Dalek, the most exciting thing in the world.
And when I was a little kid and I used to see the Dalek strips reprinted in black-and-white at the back of Doctor Who Monthly or whatever, Ihe was more fascinating to me than anything on television.
And I've long, you know, waited for the day when he will appear on television.
He almost appears in Remembrance of The Daleks in 1988.
You get at Emperor Dalek, but he looks like a Mum roll-on deodorant.
He's sort of, he's beige, he's got no eye, he's got no proper lights.
He's got no gun at all.
You can't be Emperor of the Daleks with no gun! DALEK: Emperor, abandoning bridge.
I think the greatest contribution that the Dalek strip gives the Daleks is to actually identify them and place them in this world full of these, you know, these vast machines and these conference chambers and, you know, huge, telescopic Dalek dome things, that look out in space and see rogue planets.
I don't think that, you know, we're told anything enormously coherent about society although there is, you know, a brain machine and computers that help them make decisions and so on.
But I think in terms of actually expanding their world and showing their vast space fleets, full of ships which all look slightly different, not just the slightly naff flying saucers that we see in the television series at the time.
But in terms of giving them an empire.
You know, they do look like the Roman Empire in all its glory.
I think for me my favourite Dalek strip story was the ones with the Mechanoids.
Because you see so little about them and their chase on television, that to get such a much more detailed look at their society in the comic strip was just remarkable.
They had the interesting voice, they had the flashing lights, they had the flame throwers, they had the guns.
They had the unusual movement.
And, of course, they were based on geodesic domes.
Everything was in place to make the Mechanoids big, and you could see that Nation or Terry Nation's agents were trying to push them into both merchandising and, of course, the logical place to put them was into TV Century 21.
The first artist who worked on the Daleks comic strip was Richard Jennings and to say that he's a throw back to the '50s probably sounds a little bit as though you're being slightly less than respectful, but I don't mean that, because his style of illustration it's so rich, gorgeously-produced paintings.
I think if you're going to pick out the most important, and the most readable Dalek scripts, I think you got to pick something in illustrated by Ron Turner, because he absolutely captured something really special, I think.
SCOONES: Ron Turner has a bolder use of colour.
His Daleks are much more in proportion and the strip just seems cleaner and tidier.
BENTHAM: He brought this wonderfully vivid style to the strips.
He started breaking up the panels a lot more than Richard Jennings had ever did.
And indeed his contribution was technology that was different to what Jennings had built.
It was a lot more based in, sort of, a '60s style, almost a '70s style of illustration of attack ships that looked more like Martian war machines from War of the Worlds, rather than the sort of glorious, sort of, Art nouveau, Art Deco style that Jennings had done in the past.
Richard Jennings was going for a very much, sort of, realistic kind of feel to try and give the whole thing some kind of verisimilitude.
But, actually, it's Ron Turner whose stylised work gives it that verisimilitude, I think.
It actually gives it that authenticity because he's actually thinking about how all the designs fit together.
In the middle, we suddenly had one strip which I think has become known as the Archives Of Phryne drawn by Eric Eden.
Now, more than any other artist, I think, before or since, certainly until the Marvel days of the new strips, he captured the likeness of the Daleks perfectly, probably because he was illustrating at the time that the first Peter Cushing movie had come out.
So, all of a sudden there were immense amounts of reference photographs, and in colour, for these artists to work with.
It's probably the most beautiful piece of Doctor Who related, sort of, ephemera that there's ever been.
It'sit's pure '60s pop art.
I mean, especially towards the end of its run, under Ron Turner, it's simply staggering.
You know, there should be museum exhibits of this.
You know, there should be art shows of the Dalek strip.
You don't even need to read dialogue balloons.
You could just look at it.
It's telling you the story.
It's a wonderful, wonderful piece of '60s beauty.
BENTHAM: I think it's fair to say all of us, who were readers of TV Century 21 at the time, were a little bit sad when the comic strip came to an end.
Particularly as it came to an end with a huge cliffhanger, because after two years of endeavouring on the Emperor's behalf, finally the comic strip ended with the Daleks discovering the one thing that had always eluded them, the space-time coordinates of the planet Earth.
And the very final panel has the Emperor Dalek saying that, "We are now going to go and conquer Earth.
" Which you kind of think was going to lead into the Dalek invasion of Earth, which would have been interesting and certainly what we were hoping for, but, of course, we were totally unprepared for the fact that the following week there was no Dalek strip any more in TV Century 21.
I feel so intensely nostalgic towards the Dalek strip.
A, because it was so superbly written.
David Whitaker, I think it's fair to say, more even than Terry Nation thought about the Daleks as characters in their own right.
Fleshed them out to a standard that was unknown in the '60s and probably, as far as science fiction comic strip writing, you wouldn't see until probably the closing days of the '80s when you started getting writers like J Michael Straczynski, doing strips like Babylon 5.
If you look at the Dalek language that was perfected, their measurements, they measure in Rels, the language that was used in there, it's all been carried over.
And it's lovely to see that amount of attention being lavished on a comic strip.
It's quite interesting when the Daleks are evicted from TV Century 21 and sent to TV Comic to appear alongside the second Doctor.
Suddenly, they're not intelligent any more, really.
You know, they're very much They're very much generic, rampaging monsters.
They're very much generic robots in TV Comic.
When Doctor Who itself on television was grainy and black and white, the Daleks were sort of blazing this trail of colourful adventures.
And I genuinely think, you know, if ever anyone who's new to Doctor Who gets a chance to look at anything from the '60s, dig out those Dalek strips, you won't regret it.
BARNES: And it's a great shame because, you know, we've seen in the Dalek strip their potential, you know, as a race.
TV Comic almost reads like it's pro-Doctor propaganda, and, you know, somehow we saw, you know, what the Daleks are really like in TV Century 21 and, perhaps, they're just a bit misunderstood.
DALEK: See all extensions or you will be exterminated.
I suppose the thing that attracted me to the Daleks was jealousy.
I was making films with puppets.
And if we wanted to make a robot, it was very, very difficult, if not impossible, to make a convincing robot, you know, with a puppet.
For a start off, they couldn't walk anywhere, how on earth would we be able to get them to walk like a robot? And then along came the Daleks.
Well, the Daleks were totally superior.
(BEEPING) TV Century 21, wasit was literally the Rolls-Royce of comics for the '60s generation.
I was, fortunately, too young to be a major reader of the Eagle or Look and Learn at the time, so, my first exposure to something that was markedly above what TV Comic had done with TV comic strips in the past was, with that sudden bombshell arrival of TV 21 in the bookstalls.
I think it was a rather wet and rainy Tuesday afternoon, if I can remember, seeing it in there for the first time and just being so totally blown away by not only the look of it, because it was so markedly different to a comic magazine, but also to the level of content.
One of the interesting things to note about The Daleks strips, is the Doctor never appears in these.
And, in fact, it's the Daleks who are very much the heroes of the strip.
And you find, as a reader, that when you see certain stories where the Daleks are actually in peril, that you're actually starting to worry about them.
It's a comic strip without, you know, a clear protagonist.
It's a comic strip without any remotely sympathetic figure in it, really.
But it's a comic strip that endures and captivates purely by the sheer force of imagination, I think, um, by showing us a side to these creatures which we're always denied on the television.
The Dalek strips kind of fit in to that, that thing about the '60s Doctor Who, which was before anyone had really thought about it enough.
I love that sort of magical time when there were no fans to tell you that another story had said one thing and you could only say It's from that mad world, where anything was possible, so you've got this origin story for the Daleks, which I think is just as relevant and just as chillinglywhatever you want, as the actual one we saw on telly.
BENTHAM: The idea being that a humanoid race on the planet of Skaro was in conflict with another race of humanoid creatures, the Thals, and, as a possible means of overcoming their oppressors or their opponents' technological superiority, they built these travel machines that were intended to be drone tanks for the Dal race or the Dalek race, however they were named.
It was quite a revelation to me to discover, and I think it was in the early '80s, that the What we thought of was the comic strip written by Terry Nation, 'cause that's how it was always credited on the front panels of TV Century 21, was, in fact, actually authored, I think it's right to say, at least 90% of the way through its run by David Whitaker.
HICKMAN: Whitaker's world of Daleks I mean, David Whitaker, apart from writing, in my opinion, the two best Dalek stories on telly, was sort of Just seemed never to escape them in the '60s.
He was always working on something about the Daleks.
Some annual, or some book, or a stage play, in one case.
I think if you look at some of the strips, you can see that You can see prototype versions of some of the ideas that Whitaker would use in his television scripts, The Power of The Daleks, and The Evil of The Daleks.
You can see a human collaborator in one of the stories, which is something that he'd build upon in Power and also there's a bizarre little story where some of the Daleks begin to develop human-like traits.
And that's something which is massively expanded upon in The Evil of The Daleks.
What gets underestimated with the Dalek comic strip is just how influential it was directly and indirectly on the TV series.
And, indeed, what we tend to know was of Dalek lore.
Terry Nation can see the idea of the Black Dalek or a Dalek Supreme as being the leader of the Dalek race, whereas David Whitaker quite early on put the Emperor firmly at the heart of the action.
And indeed, in one of the latter strips that it was done for, I think it was the last Dalek annual, The Dalek Outer Space Book, it even talked about the Emperor being rehoused in a larger static casing, which, of course, we then saw sometime in 1967 when The Evil of The Daleks was transmitted.
The most exciting Dalek there never was is the Golden Emperor Dalek.
If you You imagine a gold Dalek, and someone's blown up a very, very enormous beach ball, stuck it over his head.
He's got I think he's got 47 headlights around him and the tiniest little gun you ever did see.
He is, you now, he's sort of like the Mekon of the Daleks.
You know, huge brain, golden-brained Dalek, the most exciting thing in the world.
And when I was a little kid and I used to see the Dalek strips reprinted in black-and-white at the back of Doctor Who Monthly or whatever, Ihe was more fascinating to me than anything on television.
And I've long, you know, waited for the day when he will appear on television.
He almost appears in Remembrance of The Daleks in 1988.
You get at Emperor Dalek, but he looks like a Mum roll-on deodorant.
He's sort of, he's beige, he's got no eye, he's got no proper lights.
He's got no gun at all.
You can't be Emperor of the Daleks with no gun! DALEK: Emperor, abandoning bridge.
I think the greatest contribution that the Dalek strip gives the Daleks is to actually identify them and place them in this world full of these, you know, these vast machines and these conference chambers and, you know, huge, telescopic Dalek dome things, that look out in space and see rogue planets.
I don't think that, you know, we're told anything enormously coherent about society although there is, you know, a brain machine and computers that help them make decisions and so on.
But I think in terms of actually expanding their world and showing their vast space fleets, full of ships which all look slightly different, not just the slightly naff flying saucers that we see in the television series at the time.
But in terms of giving them an empire.
You know, they do look like the Roman Empire in all its glory.
I think for me my favourite Dalek strip story was the ones with the Mechanoids.
Because you see so little about them and their chase on television, that to get such a much more detailed look at their society in the comic strip was just remarkable.
They had the interesting voice, they had the flashing lights, they had the flame throwers, they had the guns.
They had the unusual movement.
And, of course, they were based on geodesic domes.
Everything was in place to make the Mechanoids big, and you could see that Nation or Terry Nation's agents were trying to push them into both merchandising and, of course, the logical place to put them was into TV Century 21.
The first artist who worked on the Daleks comic strip was Richard Jennings and to say that he's a throw back to the '50s probably sounds a little bit as though you're being slightly less than respectful, but I don't mean that, because his style of illustration it's so rich, gorgeously-produced paintings.
I think if you're going to pick out the most important, and the most readable Dalek scripts, I think you got to pick something in illustrated by Ron Turner, because he absolutely captured something really special, I think.
SCOONES: Ron Turner has a bolder use of colour.
His Daleks are much more in proportion and the strip just seems cleaner and tidier.
BENTHAM: He brought this wonderfully vivid style to the strips.
He started breaking up the panels a lot more than Richard Jennings had ever did.
And indeed his contribution was technology that was different to what Jennings had built.
It was a lot more based in, sort of, a '60s style, almost a '70s style of illustration of attack ships that looked more like Martian war machines from War of the Worlds, rather than the sort of glorious, sort of, Art nouveau, Art Deco style that Jennings had done in the past.
Richard Jennings was going for a very much, sort of, realistic kind of feel to try and give the whole thing some kind of verisimilitude.
But, actually, it's Ron Turner whose stylised work gives it that verisimilitude, I think.
It actually gives it that authenticity because he's actually thinking about how all the designs fit together.
In the middle, we suddenly had one strip which I think has become known as the Archives Of Phryne drawn by Eric Eden.
Now, more than any other artist, I think, before or since, certainly until the Marvel days of the new strips, he captured the likeness of the Daleks perfectly, probably because he was illustrating at the time that the first Peter Cushing movie had come out.
So, all of a sudden there were immense amounts of reference photographs, and in colour, for these artists to work with.
It's probably the most beautiful piece of Doctor Who related, sort of, ephemera that there's ever been.
It'sit's pure '60s pop art.
I mean, especially towards the end of its run, under Ron Turner, it's simply staggering.
You know, there should be museum exhibits of this.
You know, there should be art shows of the Dalek strip.
You don't even need to read dialogue balloons.
You could just look at it.
It's telling you the story.
It's a wonderful, wonderful piece of '60s beauty.
BENTHAM: I think it's fair to say all of us, who were readers of TV Century 21 at the time, were a little bit sad when the comic strip came to an end.
Particularly as it came to an end with a huge cliffhanger, because after two years of endeavouring on the Emperor's behalf, finally the comic strip ended with the Daleks discovering the one thing that had always eluded them, the space-time coordinates of the planet Earth.
And the very final panel has the Emperor Dalek saying that, "We are now going to go and conquer Earth.
" Which you kind of think was going to lead into the Dalek invasion of Earth, which would have been interesting and certainly what we were hoping for, but, of course, we were totally unprepared for the fact that the following week there was no Dalek strip any more in TV Century 21.
I feel so intensely nostalgic towards the Dalek strip.
A, because it was so superbly written.
David Whitaker, I think it's fair to say, more even than Terry Nation thought about the Daleks as characters in their own right.
Fleshed them out to a standard that was unknown in the '60s and probably, as far as science fiction comic strip writing, you wouldn't see until probably the closing days of the '80s when you started getting writers like J Michael Straczynski, doing strips like Babylon 5.
If you look at the Dalek language that was perfected, their measurements, they measure in Rels, the language that was used in there, it's all been carried over.
And it's lovely to see that amount of attention being lavished on a comic strip.
It's quite interesting when the Daleks are evicted from TV Century 21 and sent to TV Comic to appear alongside the second Doctor.
Suddenly, they're not intelligent any more, really.
You know, they're very much They're very much generic, rampaging monsters.
They're very much generic robots in TV Comic.
When Doctor Who itself on television was grainy and black and white, the Daleks were sort of blazing this trail of colourful adventures.
And I genuinely think, you know, if ever anyone who's new to Doctor Who gets a chance to look at anything from the '60s, dig out those Dalek strips, you won't regret it.
BARNES: And it's a great shame because, you know, we've seen in the Dalek strip their potential, you know, as a race.
TV Comic almost reads like it's pro-Doctor propaganda, and, you know, somehow we saw, you know, what the Daleks are really like in TV Century 21 and, perhaps, they're just a bit misunderstood.
DALEK: See all extensions or you will be exterminated.