“Let’s start a war! Let’s start a nuclear war!”

Day of the Daleks has never, as far as I’m aware, been involved in a legal tussle about its storyline. On the face of it, this might seem odd. The 1972 serial’s resemblance to The Terminator (1984) and its sequel Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) is more pronounced than those films’ resemblance to Harlan Ellison’s short story Soldier of Tomorrow (1957). Or his adaptation of it as an episode of The Outer Limits (1964). And they were the basis of a law suit brought by Ellison against the films’ producers.

But then there’s no evidence that Day of the Daleks’ author Louis Marks, like Ellison an excellent writer of production line television, shared another of Ellison’s qualities; that of being a difficult to work with and overly litigious old crank. Because while Ellison’s story, and indeed its tv adaption, pre-date Day of the Daleks as well as The Terminator, and many assume that the things Day and Terminator share are also shared with Soldier, this isn’t really the case.

If anything Day of the Daleks bears a greater resemblance Some Lapse of Time, a John Brunner short story from 1963, one which at least contains the existential threat of nuclear war. (Neither Ellison’s story nor his own script of it do.) Some Lapse of Time was itself adapted as an episode of BBC1’s Out of the Unknown in 1965, and is perhaps more likely to have been something that Marks (who went on to work in the BBC Plays department that made it) might have seen.¹