Revelation of the Daleks
“I'm crazy flowing over with ideas. A thousand ways to woo a lover so sincere. Love and hate what a beautiful combination."
The Long Way Round
Seen: 23rd and 30th March 1985
Revelation of the Daleks is, to quote a famous description of That Was The Week That Was a “low, sexy thing”. Superbly directed and beautifully acted throughout, its scripts are brutal, cynical, heartless and cold. On a world where the dead and the dying go to be buried or frozen and have their brains pumped full of updates by a scouse DJ who is obsessed with Americana, the severed head of an infamous war criminal is plotting the death of an old enemy. He’s also planning the resurrection of his monstrous creations and playing mind games with the love lives of his staff, the latter seemingly purely for his own sick amusement.
Sick amusement is also what any viewer will probably experience watching Revelation of the Daleks. It works by a combination of shocks and black humour, sustaining audience interest through alternating between grim chuckles and moments that make one go “ick”. It’s arguably the “darkest” serial of the old money era of Doctor Who (it is, after all, set in a cannibalistic mortuary and takes unrequited sexual obsession as a major theme) and it’s alternatingly bleakly amusing and brutally thrilling while one is actually viewing it.
Despite, or perhaps because of this atypicality, it’s also a story with a pretty secure place in Doctor Who’s firmament; consistently the highest ranking Colin Baker story, and a favourite of both its writer and its star. It’s been screened at the BFI and repeated on BBC Two, the latter making it the only Colin Baker story to get the terrestrial rerun treatment.1
That’s quite impressive given its position as the finale of a season that had seen the series come perilously close to permanent cancellation and what with it being an episode of Doctor Who with “of the Daleks” in the title, which pointedly neglects to give either the series’ lead or his arch enemies very much to do at all.
The latter is ascribable to writer Eric Saward’s opinion that Daleks are too boring to write dialogue for, and his consequent decision to centre the story on their creator Davros instead. The former would also be easy to lay at Saward’s door and many, including myself, have. Because, while he did not openly express this view to colleagues during his work on the series, Saward had (has?) a low opinion of Colin Baker as an actor. He believed he was miscast as Doctor Who and resented that producer John Nathan-Turner had re-cast the series’ lead character without consulting with him.2
That opinion, and the connected disgruntlement over lack of consultation, is certainly relevant to the scripts for this story. One character, the assassin Orcini, was specifically intended by Saward as a rebuttal of a Colin Baker performance, albeit not that which he was giving in Doctor Who. Around the time of Baker’s casting Nathan-Turner had given Saward a videocassette copy of the episode of Blake’s 7 in which Baker had appeared as the guest villain. Saward was critical of Baker’s performance, which he considered “camp” and “over the top”. When this feedback filtered through to Baker, the actor good humouredly concurred, and explained this was deliberate. This was “the only way to play” a character he described as “the greatest assassin in the universe.” This was something with which Saward bitterly disagreed. Eventually he developed the character of the mournful, low key assassin Orcini as a response.
There is another factor at play here too, and it’s related to the kind of extra curricular commercial activity that Nathan-Turner engaged in.3 JNT liked pantomime, and while the influence of this liking on the content of television Doctor Who he produced has been overstated, its other effects have perhaps been undersold. Most years of the 1980s Nathan-Turner would direct a pantomime over Christmas, and members of the Doctor Who cast, past and present, were always involved. More, those currently working on the series were expected to be involved, and while their contracts and payments were all fully above board, Nathan-Turner was willing to bend the schedules of Doctor Who in order to facilitate this other work.
Which is to say, part of the reason the Doctor and Peri only appear on film and on location in the first episode of this story4 and walk slowly from the TARDIS to the building in which the story is actually happening, is that from 26 December 1984 to 12 January 1985 Colin and Nicola were appearing in JNT’s production of Cinderella in Southampton. This engagement restricted their availability for this serial’s location filming dates (7-10 January) and some rehearsals (3-6, 11-16 January) and the script’s structure is in part an attempt to accommodate these production constraints.
Not only that, but the locations at which they appear are all, in theory, within a brief drive of Southampton itself. Director Graeme Harper was instructed by Nathan-Turner to make this a key criterion when choosing exterior locations, so as to enable Baker and Bryant to get back to the theatre in time for curtain up.5 It is this “production unorthodoxy” on Nathan-Turner’s part which allows Saward to make Orcini the de facto protagonist of Revelation of the Daleks. He becomes a replacement lead at the expense of the Doctor, and to a greater extent even than Saward’s previous attempt to de-centre Colin Baker from the series of which he was the ostensible star, </p
Attack of the Cybermen.
Doctor Who was, as 1984 became 1985, clearly not a happy ship. You do have to wonder how much knowledge of that played into the then imminent attempt by the head of the department in which it was made to cancel it. What might we might feel about this story set in “Tranquil Repose”, an alien funeral parlour, and initially commissioned as The End of the Road had he succeeded? What would we think had this been the last Doctor Who TV story? Especially once we discovered that Harper planned to shoot a final scene of the Doctor and Peri walking off into the sunset. But thanks to those foreshortened location days he ran out of time. Surely, we would ponder, they must have had an inkling that the writing was on the wall?
They didn’t. Neither did I. Before or after transmission. I had no idea a “hiatus” was coming or that the wait for the next series would be nine months longer than expected. I’m not sure I noticed. (But then I’m also pretty sure I didn’t notice Season 20 at all.) In that interim I read a lot of Target books, and didn’t even discover that the “stopgap” Radio 4 Doctor Who serial Slipback existed until it came out of on audio cassette in 1989.
Which is odd. Because I do remember this story well from first transmission. Particularly the second episode, although I am certain I also saw the first. The issue with the clash with Robin of Sherwood had been resolved by the arrival of a VHS machine in our house. Circumstances conspired to frustrate me, however. I left my one video tape, at the time containing the Robin of Sherwood episode Lord of the Trees, at my friend John Paul’s house on the morning of a Saturday I now know to be the 30th March 1985. This meant that that evening, I had to choose between Robin of Sherwood and Doctor Who.
The other video cassettes in the house, maybe two or three of them in total, were not available for my use, because they had things that my parents or grandparents or sister had recorded and not yet watched. I chose Doctor Who. In part because the cliffhanger to Part One meant I needed to see what happened next. (I didn’t see the Robin of Sherwood episode The Enchantment until I bought the commercial VHS some five years later, although by then I had read its novelisation.) Not having seen a whole episode of Robin bothered me. Doctor Who’s apparently extended absence didn’t. The generational fan trauma expressed by Doctor in Distress entirely passed me by, even as the story itself lurked strongly enough in my memory that it was the first “hookey” VHS I chose to acquire when I first became involved in organised fandom as a teenager. Because I remembered it as being a good one, and I wanted to see Colin Baker’s Doctor again after four long years.
So, what about this story works, and why? How does it sustain a reputation above that of its peers despite it, to repeat my point, being an example of Doctor Who and the Daleks with very little Doctor Who or Daleks? Despite it very firmly not doing, almost literally, what it says on the tin?6 Particularly given that, as the season’s final production, it was amongst the cheapest serials of the year?
That cheapness is not simply theoretical, an after-the-fact comparing of numbers. The serial’s production paperwork is full of examples of the director and the members of the technical production crew working their socks off to deliver something despite even tighter than usual production constraints. We are used to praising Graeme Harper’s camerawork, and his way with actors. I’ve already done it in this post. But what the production file for this story tells us is that he’s also a superb organiser and planner. At his prompting, costume designer Pat Godfrey agrees that Peri should wear her costume from the previous serial, Timelash, rather than that she make for Nicola Bryant the “white jumpsuit” requested by the script, and that Tranquil Repose’s staff can wear cheap off-the-peg medical scrubs, dyed blue.
More, faced with a script that requires more Daleks than the BBC have or that the production can possibly afford, Harper and effects designer John Brace strike a deal with BBC Enterprises to use the moulds they used to make less functional Daleks for exhibitions7 to create Davros’ new gold and white “Necros” Daleks. (The same four BBC stock props used in Resurrection of the Daleks, some parts of which date back to the 1960, play the grey and black “Skaro” Daleks who sweep in to capture Davros at the end).
Elsewhere in the paperwork, designer Alan Spaulding agrees that the lower levels of Tranquil Repose can all be built using BBC stock elements, and conceives a curious hairpin shaped double corridor using them that will allow Harper to do long, continuous shots through the catacombs without it being obvious that his cast have doubled back on themselves.
This is not the only clever idea Spaulding has. In the upper part of Tranquil Repose, great space is suggested by a repurposed staircase from a light entertainment show, black drapes, a hired in sarcophagus, stock vases and a job lot of peacock feathers. Contemporary, but high fashion, furniture is carried in from BBC stock. Walls are created by covering BBC flats with reams of a wallpaper Spaulding had found in a sale.
The offices of Kara (Elanor Bron) and the DJ (Alexei Sayle) are the same set, shot from opposing angles. This not only saves a whole set, it enables hiring Bron for only one of the serial’s two studio blocks, not two. On that set, the script calls for the DJ to destroy two Daleks. In order to save studio time, Harper destroys only one, shooting it with multiple cameras and from such different angles, that when the explosions are shown back to back, it’s unnoticeable, even if you know. When money has to be spent, it’s spent on the right things. The translucent Dalek was not cheap. Nor was it scripted. It was an unscripted pre-production idea from the design department, drawing on a previously unrealisable image from the first ever Doctor Who novelisation, published in 1964. It’s the serial’s most memorable image. Throughout this serial’s active production, corners need to be cut, but under Harper’s leadership they are cut creatively and in a way that means they never show, resulting in what’s surely inarguably the best looking production of the block. Despite the serial costing the same to make as Timelash.
Then, after all this planning, before the studio days have rolled around, and on an ill-advised winter outdoor shoot, an unforecast snowfall that wipes out the story’s entire shooting schedule. Several of the locations Harper has chosen are now inaccessible, even in the all-terrain vehicle he borrows from the farm8 where cast and crew are staying. Except for Colin and Nicola who are making their way slowly from Southampton having done Cinderella the previous night.
Under pressure to abandon the shoot, and remount later, Harper decides not to, fearing the story will simply be cancelled from under him if he throws in the towel. He goes through his shooting schedule at the farm, cutting material that might credibly be accomplished on the studio days9 , which reduces the number of actors who’ll have to work in the snow.
He then starts moving essential material from locations now inaccessible to places that can be reached by foot. Later still, he’ll stand on location extemporising replacement material for things that need to be shot but cannot be. A large gun battle between Orcini, his squire Bostock and the Daleks, becomes a brief character moment climaxing in the destruction of a single Dalek.10 Dialogue not strictly required for plot reasons is pared back or deleted entirely. A scene in which the Doctor and Peri are observed by a Dalek on a hill that now cannot be reached is replaced by a new one in which a Dalek sneaks behind then as they reach Tranquil Repose. With no Dalek operator available Harper himself pulls the prop along on a bit of fish wire after instructing the cameraman to not shoot the Dalek’s lower base.
Also on location on that hastily reorganised day11 was Clive Swift as Mr Jobel, Tranquil Repose’s Chief Embalmer. Unlike Trevor Cooper (Takis) and Colin Spaull (Lilt) whose location scenes had been relocated to the VT studio, Jobel’s appearance in the Garden of Fond Memories scene really couldn’t be moved. Jobel is a key figure in the story, and is one of several aspects of Revelation’s scripts drawn from Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (1948), which features an amorous mortician called Mr Joyboy.
The Loved One was a book Saward had re-read while on holiday in Rhodes the previous year, and while planning his script for the finale to the 1985 series of Doctor Who. Unsurprisingly, the book and the location in which he read it leaked into his serial. For example, Jobel’s student Tasambeker is based on a younger, female mortician Aimée Thanatogenos, from The Loved One, who becomes obsessed with Joyboy.12 But she is named for Tsambika, a hilltop shrine to the Virgin Mary on Rhodes.13 While Saward recalls naming the Stengos family in his story after the operator of a local ferry, it also bears more than a passing resemblance to Thanatogenos. Other sources seem more earthy. Kara is a potato dish served widely, including on Rhodes. Doctor Who fandom has long noted that Lilt is a soft drink, while missing that Takis is a savoury snack eaten like crisps. Taken together they might suggest Saward had resorted to naming characters out of the hotel minibar.
Less fatuously, “Orsini” is the patronym of one of the most influential Italian houses of the 11th to 18th centuries. The family can boast three Popes, and dozens of other senior catholic churchmen. Another notable Orsini was Cardinal Deacon Giovanni Battista Orsini (1450-1503) Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller (1467-76), an organisation based for much of its history on Rhodes14 and perhaps the twinning and intertwining of these influences is best summarised by how his squire Bostock draws his name from “Mrs Komstock”, a minor character in Waugh’s novel, while they are both members of the Order of Oberon, which is a homophone for the name of Waugh’s eldest son.
The other significant influence on Revelation’s scripts is much closer to home, former Doctor Who script editor Robert Holmes. Holmes’ The Caves of Androzani (1984) had rightly proved hugely popular and much of the 1985 series of Doctor Who revolves around Sawardian attempts to recreate it. Androzani’s villain Sharez Jek’s Phantom of the Opera 15 obsession with Peri being replicated in a series with much more straightforward leerings at her, which continue here with her unpleasant encounter with Jobel.
Revelation also positions its characters as a series of “double acts”, who almost exclusively talk to each other.16 Not just Orcini and Bostock, but also Kara and (her secretary) Vogel, Takis and Lilt, Jobel and Tasambeker, Natasha and Grigory and the Doctor and Peri. This is a widely observed characteristic of Holmes’ work. 17 Although in the case of Orcini and Bostock, Saward also had some specific literary antecedents in mind, with Orcini an obvious, if superficial, Don Quixote18 figure, and Bostock having commonalities with Quixote’s own squire, Sancho Panza, whose mundane earthiness is traditionally held to contrast with Quixote’s idealism.
There is a similar, although presumably not entirely deliberate, juxtaposition in how this is a story that takes food shortages as a theme which was almost entirely produced within the period that Do They Know Its Christmas? was the UK #1 single. Often referred to as Band Aid, after the one-day super group that recorded it, this was a record made as a response to the 23 October 1984, BBC news report of a “biblical famine”19 in Ethiopia. Saward’s own response is blackly comic, rather than charitable. But it is also, and in keeping with much of his work on Doctor Who, essentially despairing. There is, as there is with his presentation of security forces as casually and horrifically violent, but ultimately not just inevitable but necessary, a genuine sense of laughter in the dark at the nature of reality itself.
Those security guard characters, Takis and Lilt, are relatively featureless on the page, and it’s again through Harper’s work that they gain what interest they have in the finished production. Reimagined, and then cast, by the director as a sinister version of the early film comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, with Trevor Cooper visibly making use of physical motifs from Hardy’s performance, such as an affirming nod of the head, and a forefinger held aloft, they come to life, despite inconsistent scripting. Composer Roger Limb was asked to include the refrain from the folk music “cuckoo song” used to open many of Laurel and Hardy’s film’s together, and provided his own variation.
There are other counter readings in Harper’s casting that work to the production’s benefit. The grave robbing doctor Grigory was originally written as an effete older man, prone to rubric such as “… dear thing”. Harper cast a younger actor, and dispensed with a lot of the dialogue tags in rehearsal, along with much of the petty interpersonal rivalry between his character and fellow rebel Natasha.20 (That there’s as much as there is in the finished serial is an indication of how much there was to start with.)
Cutting excess, and often excessively confrontational, dialogue seems to have been a constant part of the rehearsal process. Jobel’s repetitive misogyny was toned down (in the rehearsal script, he constantly refers to the President’s late wife whose funeral he’s overseeing as “the witch”). Perhaps most mercifully, a moment where the Doctor angrily berates Peri for crying at the death of the Mutant (“How dare you insult his memory with your self-pity!”) with the suggestion that he then strike her, was firmly crossed through either before or on location.
Also lost was a distinctly unpleasant conversation between Takis and Lilt about Mr Jobel’s peculiar attractiveness to women. “P’raps it’s because he doesn’t wash,” speculates Takis, and Lilt decides to “cut back on the old ablutions” himself. “But there’s no scope for reduction there,” points out Takis: “Your armpits are already like maggot farms.”
Despite, or perhaps because of, all the work being done on the scripts, actor Terry Molloy, returning as Davros for what he would be his favourite of his three television appearances as the character, found being in Harper’s rehearsals and on his set a collegiate experience; the director was happy to take ideas on board from anyone in the cast and crew if he thought they’d work. In Molloy’s case this meant accepting his suggestions that Davros fire electric bolts from his fingers, in the manner of the Emperor in Return of the Jedi and that he be seen to float in order to dispel the long running joke about Daleks not being able to climb stairs, as well as some line amendments.21
It is also arguable that Harper’s sense of style helps obscure how much the scripts for this serial draw on earlier stories from the 1985 series. Both Vengeance on Varos and The Two Doctors had featured scenes in which the consumption of human meat was proposed, discussed or planned. In Revelation as in Timelash, the villain (the Borad/Davros) is killed only for him to be revealed as a clone meant to lure assassins. Varos also has the characters Etta and Arak, who act as a chorus and give a running commentary on events in the story, in a similar manner to Revelation’s DJ. One could choose to see this creative recycling as another kind of cannibalism.
More charitably, it’s as if Saward is pulling together everything that has worked and not worked about Doctor Who under his de facto creative leadership, and giving it a final run around the park. A last “crusade”, as Orcini’s squire Bostock describes their commission to assassinate Davros. If that’s the case, it’s down to Harper, the practical organiser with greater insight, the Bostock to Saward’s desperately questing Orcini, that the story succeeds as well as it does.
“He wanted a perfect, honourable kill and of course, there’s no such thing” noted Saward of Orcini later. “Orcini was very much a lost cause who happened to be in the right place at the right time”.
Which is also, perhaps, the best description of the Doctor Who story of which Orcini is the lead character, and which is the final significant contribution to Doctor Who of Eric Saward.
It might even serve as their epitaph.
The story was repeated in the UK on BBC Two in 1992. Shown on Fridays at 19:15, it was seen by successively 1.7, 1.8, 1.6 and 1.2m viewers. If that seems like twice as many episodes as this story has, it’s because the 45m episodes of Doctor Who’s 1985 series had to be cut into two for some oversea sales (resulting in some remarkably undramatic cliffhangers) and it was in this overseas form that the serial was repeated.
This is something Nathan-Turner was under no obligation to do, but producers and script editors with better, or at least different, working relationships would have collaborated on such a decision, and Saward would have been aware of other programmes then being made in BBC Drama where this did happen. He might even have known that script editor Terrance Dicks had been producer Barry Letts’ full partner in the casting of Tom Baker as Doctor Who ten years before, and that Dicks frequently deputised producer functions on Doctor Who (e.g. supervising filming days, such as William Hartnell’s single day on The Three Doctors [1972/3]) as part of learning to be a producer himself. Nathan-Turner was temperamentally unwilling to delegate in this manner.
They may also have contributed to the producer’s rapidly falling standing within BBC Drama, particularly now his former patrons, David Reid and Graeme MacDonald had moved on, back to commercial television and to being Controller of BBC Two respectively.
This is the first time Doctor Who’s regular characters have not appeared in an episode’s studio scenes since The Space Pirates Episode Six (1969).
To be scrupulously fair to Nathan-Turner, these were filming days that would, in any event, have had to be curtailed on account of the early winter sunset, regardless of how his cast were spending their evenings.
And given that the story’s VHS release was in a special tin, actually literally eventually too.
The 1984 International Garden Festival had been held in Liverpool, and the BBC had a tent. Outside it was a Doctor Who display, which included three ‘new’ Daleks made by the BBC plaster shop from new moulds. An agreement between the production and Enterprises was made for the props to be used by Enterprises once the serial was completed.
Bolinge Hill, Hampshire.
E.g the serial’s final scene was scheduled for one of the location days, but moving it to studio removed the need to take Trevor Cooper and Colin Spaull out into the snow.
It is important a Dalek is destroyed at this point as its death alerts Davros to Orcini’s presence.
8th January 1985 at IBM’s North Harbour building. It was constructed on land reclaimed from Portsmouth Harbour bed and completed in 1974.
Although curiously, Jobel is not in the first draft of this serial that Saward wrote, and which is included in the Blu-ray supplementary material.
Local tradition invites childless women who wish to conceive to approach the shrine barefoot, and pray to the virgin for a child.
Although not during Orsini’s own term of office.
Le Fantôme de l'Opéra (1909-10) by Gaston Leroux, imminently to gain a new audience in the English speaking world due to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s announced but not yet produced musical adaptation.
It then draws attention to this in dialogue, just in case we don't notice.
Perhaps more widely observed than it is implemented!
Drawn from the eponymous Knight of Miguel de Cervantes two part novel (1605/15).
I take the phrase from the original news report.
E.g. the exchange between Stengos and his daughter where he asks “Who is this with you” and she answers “A friend” was scripted as him asking if Grigory was her husband, to which she caustically replied “You’re joking!”
E.g. “A box of delight!” a sly reference to the hugely successful 1984 BBC serial of a very similar title, was added by Molloy in rehearsal.