Dr Who and the Daleks
“Red and Yellow and Pink and Green, Purple and Orange and Blue”
Seen: 20th April 1985
Dr Who And The Daleks,a 1965 cinema film adaptation of Doctor Who’s first Dalek serial, had its British television premiere on 1st July 1972. This was exactly one week after the conclusion of Doctor Who’s then most recent series, and in an early evening slot which almost overlapped with that just vacated by The Time Monster. In response to this bit of what we might now call “brand synergy”, Jon Pertwee complained in person to BBC One Controller Paul Fox, citing both his own low opinion of the film’s quality and his alarm at the possibility that it might distract viewers from the version of Doctor Who in which he was starring.
On one level you can see Pertwee’s point. Everyone involved in Doctor Who had worked very hard to make it a success again after its near-death experience of 1969/70, and the series was undeniably on the up. Viewing figures? AI? Public engagement and critical response? Tick tick tick tick! But there’s also a paradoxical element to his complaint. If the film was bad, then how could it detract from the work he and his colleagues had been doing? It may have been that the actor, now fully established as Doctor Who and about to embark on an unprecedented fourth year in the role, was sensitive about people being reminded that other actors had played his part. In which case, the imminence of guest turns by both his television predecessors must have been positively alarming.
He need not have worried. As Doctor Who geared up for its tenth year on air, it was surely at worst harmless to remind people of the series’ longevity. The public liked the Pertwee iteration of Doctor Who, and the series was in no danger of cancellation and wouldn’t be for more than a dozen years. Nodding at the programme’s heritage could only enhance its newly re-found prestige. Great Britain is, after all, a society that prizes tradition, and pretended at tradition, above almost anything else.
Let’s fast forward right to the end of that decade or so of uninterrupted security. There we find television Doctor Who in much less rude health. I don’t mean this as a comment on my own subjective view of its creative success. I simply mean that early 1985 had seen the series facing a genuine threat to its continuation for the first time since it became clear that the Pertwee spearheaded revamp was working very well indeed.
It was at this point, early Spring 1985, that in one of those bookends that real life likes to throw at us, BBC One decided to show the film again. It again scheduled it within a month of the end of the current series of television Doctor Who. This time Dr Who And The Daleks was relegated to a Saturday morning slot. It was filler, rather than an event, and it is frankly unlikely that a showing of a film now exactly twenty years out of the cinema was prominent amongst the concerns 1985’s incumbent Doctor, Colin Baker, had about the programme’s immediate future. Or that he’d have had the opportunity to bring it up socially with BBC One Controller Michael Grade if it was.
By 1985 the film and its sequel, key points in Doctor Who’s mid 1960s popularity peak (“Dalekmania”) had come to be as disregarded by fandom as the series itself had by BBC management. But whereas Grade regarded 1985’s Doctor Who as violent, unimaginative and essentially unsuitable for children, Doctor Who fandom disliked 1965’s Dr Who And The Daleks for being childish and for not having the proper music. For having the temerity to have Doctor Who referring to himself as Doctor Who. Most monstrously, it was criticized for having Peter Cushing in the title role. Rather than a “proper Doctor”. As if as a fandom we were / are not absurdly lucky to have him, one of the greatest of all British film stars, headlining any version of our little show.
Now, I didn’t know any of this when I sat down to watch Dr Who And The Daleks on what I remember as quite a cool Saturday morning. I had not been apprised of the received wisdom, and so insensitively, and with no regard for propriety, I uncomplicatedly loved it. In part because I was seven, and it’s a kids’ film, and one only as old then as plenty of still-in-circulation-in-prime-time early noughties blockbusters are now. It’s also radically different to the 1985 series of Doctor Who. Or rather, the 1985 series of Doctor Who is radically different to it. Post-dating it as it does. There is, let us be frank, really very little argument that this film isn’t a more suitable for children story about Doctor Who fighting the Daleks than the series’ then most recent television story. Not least because it gives both of them things to do.
There’s a good reason that, back in 1965, Dr Who And The Daleks was the equivalent of such blockbusters, making so much money so quickly that, at least according to Dalek creator Terry Nation, the production company behind it (Amicus/Aaru) did not have enough time to hide his share of the proceeds from him before his first payout was due. It’s a simple reason too; It's that it’s a hugely entertaining technicolor /techniscope marvel. It squashes that 175m monochrome Dalek serial down into 82 pacey fun-filled minutes that swish along in a manner highly suitable for a child audience in 1965, 1985 and, if my own primary school aged son and his cousins are anything to go by, 2024 as well.
I want to call it an efficient piece of filmmaking. But that’s a term that makes it sound clinical, which it firmly isn’t. Not least because of Cushing’s cheerful, caring, goofy, sincere Doctor and those dazzling, gorgeous multi-coloured Daleks. Their never-bettered colour scheme developed from those seen in The Dalek Book and The Daleks strip in weekly comic TV Century 21. In context, the film’s opening scene’s reveal that Dr Who is reading a copy of The Eagle seems both acknowledgment and statement of intent. TV Century 21 saw itself firmly in the tradition of Eagle, and its SF stories employed a development of the older comic’s aesthetic. When Dr Who’s TARDIS takes him and his family to Skaro a few minutes later, it’s as if he’s stepped into the pages of a comic he was enjoying reading. Which is essentially the experience the film was offering its young audience on original release; a chance to become immersed in the cinema with the kind of painterly, verging-on-pop-art, bright-but-not-gaudy entertainment they were already enjoying on the page.
Also much of the mid 1960s is the film’s climax in which the Daleks are stopped from detonating an atomic bomb - a change from the end of the TV serial that was nevertheless an option during its development. Yet this was something else that seemed urgent again in 1985, as the Cold War renewed itself after the decade of detente, as sabres rattled in distant silos. This is, unfortunately, something else that finds echoes in the third decade of the new century as well.
One oddity is that Dr Who And The Daleks has also historically not found favour with wings of fandom that might be assumed to be in-tune with its lighter, brighter approach. Fans of later Tom Baker stories or the first Sylvester McCoy series, say. I suspect that this is because the fan scorn to which Dr Who And the Daleks was subjected, particularly in the 1980s, partially originates in the fan need for things to fit. Not least to fit into the holy writ of continuity. Which it doesn’t. At least not without resorting to ideas such as Chameleon Arches that are antithetical to its unblinking approach to Doctor Who. Now, that’s no basis at all on which to judge a piece of popular entertainment. No basis at all. Although I do not claim to be immune to these fannish impulses, because I know full well that when I first saw this film I contemplated long and hard its position in Doctor Who continuity and decided that it took place before the television series.
No, really.
Whether I thought it was a prequel (I was aware of the term, because I knew that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which I had not seen, had been one) or whether I thought it was simply the film from which the TV series had been spun off, I don’t know. But I do know I had seen the Dad’s Army film, which took place before the TV series. Or seemed to, to a child who had seen repeats of later colour episodes of the series and was unaware that the series had a monochrome origin story that was not in circulation. After all, Cushing’s Doctor was younger than Hartnell’s. Tovey’s Susan younger than the few photographs I had seen of Carole Ann Ford’s. And this was their first ever meeting with the Daleks. This had to be the beginning of all beginnings, right?
What interests me, looking back, is that even at that age I didn’t contemplate that Cushing was a different Doctor to Hartnell. He was a different actor playing the same Doctor, as I knew Richard Hurndall had been. The “official” Doctors, all lined up in an uninterrupted row with their ordinal numbers, were a fixed point in time. Indisputable. Even to the very youngest viewers-who-were-becoming fans. This is very odd. That a character known for being played by multiple actors should face limits not just on the number (or kinds) of actor who can play them, but on the legitimacy of those who already have. There is, the fannish need to organise aside, no reason for Peter Cushing not to count as a Doctor Who. But he’s a casualty of a quest for a kind of authenticity. One that refuses to accept variation. It’s not far from a point the film makes itself, when discussing the Daleks’ own motivation for behaving as they do.
“You are different from them, and they are afraid of anything different. And what people are afraid of, they try to destroy.”
I don’t mean to imply that Doctor Who fandom tends to fascism. But there are reasons it’s a long standing fan joke that Doctor Who is a programme capable of almost anything, but also one in which a sizeable percentage of the fandom will react violently to any suggestion of wholesale change - and I submit fairly recent fan reaction to concepts such as Timeless Doctors and Bigeneration as evidence to support this fact. This was even more the case in 1985. Any kind of multiplicity was frowned on in this era of fandom. Target novelisations were routinely critiqued on their level of fidelity to the television original. Or rather to fans’ memories of the television original, what with it almost always being largely inaccessible outside very rarefied circles. There’s an immaturity in this, of the kind only possessed by those who have begun to mature, the kind which actual children do not commit. I’ve a feeling it inhibited fandom. Possibly even the series itself. After all, can one imagine a world in which John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward were capable of asking Peter Cushing to play the first Doctor in The Five Doctors and damn the footling details of continuity? The idea never crossed their minds. It would have been good though, right?
I have a feeling the 1989 VHS release of the original television serial on which this film is based helped it climb out of the fan critical hole into which it had been cast. After that, the film could no longer be seen as a kind of inadequate substitute, one forced onto a deprived fandom. Not when both could be bought in the same branch of Woolworths. 1995 brought the joyous celebratory thirtieth anniversary documentary Dalekmania! 1996 beautiful widescreen VHSes and a Doctor Who Magazine special. The 21st century has seen design elements from the film, such as its TARDIS doors and details of its Daleks, influence the revived television series. The HD and 4K revolution has meant multiple re-releases with increasing amounts of picture detail, allowing the viewer to appreciate the film’s design work and art direction. A friend who saw the film for the first time recently was disappointed in it. They felt it did not live up to its reputation, which they had gathered was as “... a slightly better version of Serial B”.
Reader, I did not see that coming.
I had not seen any of The Five Faces of Doctor Who or Doctor Who And The Monsters repeats of stories from the 1960s and 1970s. I was unaware that a handful of 1970s adventures were now available on VHS tapes, mostly priced at eye-watering points. I had adored The Five Doctors on transmission. I was being to play the lottery that was going into the County Library and taking out any Target book I had not read, and often only finding out which Doctor Who it featured once I’d got it home. But while Dr Who and the Daleks is not, apparently, proper Doctor Who, it was the first opportunity I ever had to go and look at something from the series’ past with my own eyes. Much as it would have been for the children who watched that 1972 television premiere that so worried Jon Pertwee.
That 1985 screening was, unintentionally, a masterstroke. A moment in which the audience could consider the series’ history in the absence of its present. It's a choice echoed in Russell T Davies' much more active decision to commission the creation of a cut-down and colourised version of the original serial for Doctor Who's sixtieth anniversary. That itself is an idea deeply rooted in an understanding of how well this story works, not just as an origin but as an invitation; as a suggestion that the audience engage with Doctor Who's past.
An opportunity for time travel.
