While An Unearthly Child and Anthony Coburn laid the foundations for Doctor Who as we know it today, it was arguably The Daleks and Terry Nation that ensured that there is a Doctor Who today. The show’s debut had been a success and generally well received, yet it needed a boost, a connection to the popular consciousness - enter The Daleks.
Known primarily as a comedy writer for the Goons and, at that time, Tony Hancock, Terry Nation may have seemed an unusual choice to be one of the writers invited to submit to the forthcoming Doctor Who in July of 1963, yet David Whitaker had been impressed with Nation’s first forays into science-fiction in 1962 with three episodes of ITV’s Out of this World: Imposter, Botony Bay and Immigrant, with Botony Bay being an entirely original work by the writer.
Speaking to Doctor Who Magazine in 1987, Nation tells of his initial outrage at being offered Doctor Who:
“We were working in a theatre in Nottingham, and my agent called from London and said ‘The BBC wants you to do a think called ‘Doctor Who’, it’s for the children’s television slot, science fiction’, and I said ‘How dare they? I don’t do things like that!’, but then I’d been asked because of this ‘Out of this World’ story. Well, this particular night, Tony Hancock and I had a big dispute. I wanted him to try some new material, and I’m not sure if I was fired or if I walked out, but the result was that I was on a train back to London, thinking ‘Hey, wait a minute! I’m out of work!’.”
By late July 1963, David Whitaker had received a detailed six-part storyline proposal from Nation entitled The Mutants (previously The Survivors) and instructs the BBC Copyright department to commission, Nation having managed to secure a higher than usual fee for his services.
Terry Nation with his famous creations
The Mutants was scheduled fourth in the series’ run and Rex Tucker was assigned to direct before his decision to leave the show, eventually to be replaced by Christopher Barry and Richard Martin. By early August the serial was expanded to seven episodes and given the new working title of Beyond the Sun, before reverting back to the original Mutants title and the first draft being sent back to Nation for rewrites at the suggestion of Whitaker. Through cancellations and delays The Mutants/The Daleks would eventually be moved to second in the running order, immediately after opening serial An Unearthly Child, Producer Verity Lambert said in a 1980s interview that many felt the serial went against creator Sydney Newman’s wishes:
Verity Lambert with a Dalek, pictured here in 1964
“David chose Terry Nation on the strength of some science fiction work he’d already done for ITV, ‘Journey Into the Unknown’. At first we were a bit wary about accepting his storyline about the Daleks, because of the bug-eyed monster concept. Sydney Newman had outlined a series that was part history and part educational towards science; the aim being to expose children to science and history and hopefully interest them in it. I didn’t feel the Daleks altered Sydney Newman’s format, mainly as they were in functioning metal cases. The crisis came when Donald Wilson saw the scripts for the first Dalek serial. Having spent so much time defending ‘Doctor Who’, he saw the Daleks as just bug-eyed monsters, which went against what he felt should be the theme of the science-fiction stories. There was a strong disagreement between us, in fact it went as far as Donald Wilson telling us not to do the show. What saved it in the end was purely that fact that we had nothing to replace it in the time alloted. It was the Daleks or nothing. What was very nice, though, was Donald Wilson coming up to me after the Daleks had taken off and saying ‘You obviously understand this programme better than I do. I’ll leave it to you’.”
Speaking in 1987, director Christopher Barry agrees that Sydney Newman was initially displeased with The Daleks:
“On ‘The Daleks’, Richard Martin and I worked very closely in the planning stages, and because our styles weren’t radically different, there weren’t any real clashes. The only problems we did experience came from Sydney Newman, who’d had quite a hand in the creation of the show and didn’t like the Daleks at all. I think he felt they were childish science fiction. When I first saw them, though, I was absolutely delighted.”
Originally two principal designers were designated to work on the show during it’s first season, both with very different remits. Barry Newbury would handle all historical adventures, while Raymond Cusick would handle the future set episodes, though originally Ridley Scott had been assigned to design The Daleks. Upon being given the assignment, Cusick called Nation who told the designer of his vision and that he wished for his new creations to “glide” like Georgian State dancers, saying in 1992:
“I’d grown up watching movies and was always vaguely disappointed because I knew the monsters were people, they were dressed-up people. So my first requirement was to make my monster non-humanoid. I didn’t want it to look like somebody dressed up in a funny costume, so I had to eliminate the legs. And I’d been to a concert of the Georgian State Dancers, and these ladies had these long skirts that went right down to the floor and they appeared to glide, you couldn’t see their feet at all. And I thought that was the sort of movement I wanted to achieve. And then the voice, it had to be a non-humanoid voice, coming out of a computer. I made a few mistakes. It would have been easier had I given them more manipulable hands. When they wanted to pass things to one another, it caused terrible problems. So basically with those requirements, that’s how the Daleks evolved.”
Cusick himself commented on the urban-myth of the pepper pot design in 2008:
“People do say I was inspired by a pepper pot - but I always think ‘If that’s all it takes to become a designer then it’s a doddle’.”
In fact the pepper pot claims came from a lunch meeting with special effects man Bill Roberts, Christopher Barry and Mervyn Pinfield, Cusick picking up a pepper pot from the table and moving it around the table, telling him that this is now the Dalek would move - no visible means.
“Ever since then people say I was inspired by a pepper pot - but it could have been the salt pot I picked up. When I’m asked what I was inspired by I suppose it was really a system of logic because I realised that you’ve got to have an operator to operate them. If you had anything mechanical, 10 to one on the take it would go wrong, so you’ve got a human being in there who would be absolutely totally reliable… I then thought ‘Well, the operator’s got to sit down’, [so I] drew a seat, ergonomic height, 18in, got the operator down, and then drew round him. That’s how the basic shape appeared.”
Terry Nation agreed that Cusick’s contribution to the popularity of the Daleks was enormous:
“Raymond Cusick made a tremendous contribution, and I would love to be glib enough to put it into percentage terms, but you can’t do that. You start with something that’s a writer’s dream, that he’s put down in words, and amended, and added to in conversations. Something starts there. Cusick didn’t get anything, to my understanding. I think they may have given him a hundred pound bonus, but he was a salaried employee, and I think he knew the nature of his work, and it was what he did every week. The copyrights resided with the BBC and myself, and there were lovely legal words to cover these things, so that before they could merchandise anything, they had to have my agreement. I was very lucky. The salt cellar part is the legend: that gave Raymond Cusick the idea for the shape. He was restricted by budget, obviously – it wasn’t a big budget show we were doing. But yes, he made a tremendous contribution. Whatever the Daleks are or were, his contribution was vast.”
Raymond Cusick with the Daleks, pictured here in 1964.
Filming commenced in early November and the entire first episode is deemed unfit for broadcast due to a technical fault, talk-back from the production assistant’s headphones being audible on the finished product. The episode was remounted and production pushed back one week. Speaking to John Fleming in 1978, Nation observed that nobody had any confidence in the serial or his creations:
“I didn’t have any confidence in the series. I read the brochure at the briefing and said, “There’s no way this show can ever succeed.” And I don’t think it could have done if it had followed the route that they had planned for it. That it actually went into historical situations and was reasonably educational. That was the direction the BBC wanted to take and Sydney Newman was bitterly opposed to any bug-eyed monsters. We could go into the future, but it had to have a relatively scientific base and it was going to be ‘good solid stuff’. He violently objected to the Daleks when he saw them in the script. It was only the determination of the producer Verity Lambert that got them on. Or maybe it was the fact that the BBC had to go on. They’d had them built and they’d spent so much money they had to go on. Nobody had faith in them, including myself.”
No bug eyed monsters!
The Daleks however captured the imagination, igniting interest in Doctor Who as the nation’s playgrounds reverberated with cries of “exterminate, exterminate,” the show ascending to ratings of 10.4m for episodes six and seven of the serial. It wouldn’t be until the Christmas of 1964 that Dalekmania truly entered the stratosphere, with toys and games flooding shelves and stockings. The rest is history.
Legend says however that when Terry Nation’s former charge Tony Hancock saw the Daleks, he exclaimed: “That bloody Nation! He stole my Daleks!” claiming that the design to the metallic monsters had been dreamed up in late night creative sessions, Hancock envisioning “an inverted cone, covered in ping pong balls and with a sink plunger coming out of its head.” Perhaps the final word however should go to Sydney Newman who graciously admits how wrong many were about the potential of the Daleks:
“Being a real aficionado of science fiction, I hated stories which used bug-eyed monsters, otherwise known as BEM’s. I write in my memo that there would be no bug-eyed monsters in ‘Doctor Who’. And after a few episodes, Verity turned up with the Daleks! I bawled her out for it, but she said ‘Honest, Sydney, they’re not bug-eyed monsters – they’re human beings who are so advanced that their bodies have atrophied and they need these casings to manipulate and do the things they want!’. Of course, the Daleks took off and captured everybody’s imagination. Some of the best thing I have ever done are the thing I never wanted to do. It’s true! It’s worked out that way.”
This article is the second in our “Story by Story” series running all this week celebrating The Daleks. DWW welcomes all submissions and pitches on the theme throughout the week at [email protected]
In future weeks we shall be celebrating Inside the Spaceship (Nov 3 – 9), Marco Polo (Nov 10 – 16), The Keys of Marinus (Nov 17 – 23), The Aztecs (Nov 24 – 30), The Sensorites (Dec 1 – 7) and The Reign of Terror (Dec 8 – 14).
