The Daleks, by Oliver Waite (and Terry Nation, and David Whitaker, and “Alan Smithee”)

Posted on 11 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Apologies for length, but this is an important monograph about an important Doctor Who story.

I first watched the original version of The Daleks back in 2007, from the DVD set of the first three Who stories. I wrote then:

Great fun. I had of course read David Whitaker’s novelisation, roughtly 25 years ago. A few things that sprang to mind:

1) the settings were very convincing – the Dalek city (OK, we know with the eye of hindsight that it was a model shot), the sense that this was a big landscape with forest, swamp and caves.

2) Barbara’s romance with Ganatus – there is surely some fanfic dealing with that somewhere?

3) The devious Doctor, sabotaging the TARDIS deliberately to get a chance to explore the city.

4) The time travellers, despite Barbara’s relations with Ganatus, are all set to just bugger off and leave the Thals to their doom at the end of episode 4.

5) The end of episode 6 is indeed a literal cliff-hanger – with a brutal resolution

6) Terry Nation’s attack on pacifism. A lot more ideological than I remembered from the book.

7) The Daleks at the end talking about the total extermination of the Thals practically raise their plungers in Nazi salutes – sounds silly when I describe it but actually very effective.

8) the one bit that really didn’t work – the fight at the end; the time-travellers and Thals win too easily.

Anyhow, well worth it. I watched with the closed caption commentary, which to be honest was more annoying than helpful on the whole. Though it was interesting that the very day of the filming of the Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks was 22 November 1963, the day before the first Doctor Who (recorded over a month before) was to be broadcast, and also the day of John F Kennedy’s assassination. (And of the deaths of C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley; but who remembers that?)

When I came back to it in 2009 early in my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

The Daleks really is where Doctor Who gets going. There is a case to be made that the pepperpots never get so interesting again. Certainly they are incomprehensible, blankly hostile, psychopathically destructive, and strangely watchable. The conversion of the Thals from pacifists to fighters has some moral ambiguity – the Tardis crew are motivated by their own need to get away, and there is a certain air of tragedy even in the final victory. (Shame that the actual final fight scene is a bit crap.) And Barbara gets the first Who romance with Ganatus (comprehensively rewritten to Barbara/Ian by David Whitaker for the book).

Coming back to it again, I felt that it holds up really well, especially if you are sensitive to the cramped sets and other constraints of the production. The four main cast are very good, clearly getting into their stride. And I should have previously mentioned the superb incidental music of Tristram Cary. You can get it in this box set.

The colorised and abbreviated version of the story released a few years back (you can get it here) foolishly dumps Cary’s music, misses some of the plot and loses out a bit on pacing, but ends with this lovely montage of the rest of the Hartnell era.

I know the novelisation well, and re-read it for this post. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

I ran towards the sound, the branches of trees cracking and powdering in clouds around me as I forced my way through. I found Barbara with her back pressed up against a tree, the knuckles of one hand pushed hard against her teeth. She was staring away from me into some bushes. I caught the glint of the eyes of some animal or other and stopped dead still.

When I last read it in 2008, I wrote:

There was a time when this was literally the only Doctor Who book in existence (under its excellent original 1964 title of Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks); indeed it was the only commercially available representation of any Doctor Who story, in those days long before video-recorders (let alone DVDs). So we have Whitaker taking much greater liberty with Terry Nation’s TV script than almost any other novelisation (John Lucarotti’s treatment of The Massacre differs even more from the story as broadcast, but he was reverting back to his own original script).

And the result is quite possibly the best of the novelisations, judged as a novel. The opening of the story is comprehensively rewritten, Ian being an unemployed research scientist who accidentally encounters Barbara, who has been tutoring the mysterious Susan, and gets involved with the Doctor and his Tardis. So much time is invested – wisely – in setting the scene that we are a third of the way through the book before we reach the equivalent point to the end of the TV story’s first episode (out of seven).

The biggest novelty, for those of us who have read almost any of the subsequent hundreds of Who books, is that the whole story is told in the first person, from Ian’s point of view. (It’s not unknown in later Who literature, but it is very unusual.) This does require a certain amount of narrative juggling, but Whitaker gets away with it better than I remembered from when I first read this, three decades ago.

Today’s generation of fans will squee at the pronounced sexual tension in the Ian/Barbara relationship here – the TV story has Barbara close to flirting with Ganatus, one of the Thals, but he barely gets to look at her on the printed page. Poor Susan rather fades into the background as well after she has done her mercy run to the forest. The characterisation of the Doctor is much more harsh and edgy than Hartnell’s depiction; since Whitaker was the story editor, perhaps this was what he had originally in mind? (A possibility supported by the surviving first cut of the first ever episode.)

And the Daleks themselves are pretty memorable here, though Whitaker seems a bit confused about their size – three feet high at one point, four foot six at another, though the illustrations are of our “normal” sized pepperpots. However, this confusion is compensated for by the glorious description of the mutants within the metal casings, and their glass-enclosed leader. The TV show has never managed such memorable presentations of the creatures inside, though it has occasionally tried. (The versions encountered by the Ninth Doctor come closest.)

Anyway, this is an excellent read, well worth hunting down.

I still like this book a lot, and I wrote in more detail a few weeks ago about the illustrations and the later career of Arnold Schwartzman, who is still living at the age of 90. You can get Doctor Who and the Daleks here.

In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, so I went and also rewatched the Peter Cushing film Dr Who and the Daleks. Last time I saw it, in 2010, I wrote:

As a Doctor Who fan, it is impossible not to judge this film in comparison with the original seven-part Dalek story, so I won’t really try. The positives: it is in colour, which is a huge difference. It looks better (except, oddly enough, the interior of Dr. Who’s Tardis, which just looks like a film set with some machines dotted around it). The plot is tighter – it’s difficult (with one exception, which I’ll get to) to remember what has been cut from the original story to produce a film half its length, and some of the best bits are still there. The music is decent – not as unearthly as in the TV version, but not offensive either.

The huge difference, however, is in the performances and portrayals. Peter Cushing plays elderly slightly comical scientist Dr. Who, who keeps a time machine called ‘Tardis’ in his back garden, shaped like a police box for some reason. He doesn’t have the grumpy gravitas of William Hartnell, but I detect some homage to his portrayal in the approach taken by Sylvester McCoy. Roberta Tovey as his nine-year-old granddaughter Susie is actually rather good, and recasts Carole Anne Ford with perhaps a bit more grit.

When I first saw this on a Saturday morning repeat aged about 11, the surprise was that Ian is played by Roy Castle, who of course I knew as the presenter of the BBC children’s programme Record Breakers. This was actually his second film role – he had also appeared with Peter Cushing in another Max Subotsky film with a doctor in the title (Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors) earlier in 1965. Castle’s Ian starts as a clown but more or less settles into the heroic sidekick to Cushing’s Who by the end, probably the closest of the four main characters to the TV version (though William Russell’s Ian is much brainier).

The most serious cut in the film as compared to the TV original is Barbara, Dr. Who’s other grand-daughter, played by Jennie Linden. She gets almost nothing to do, except that her over-vigorous embrace of Ian sets Tardis going in the first place. (And even that is portrayed as Ian’s clumsiness.) She is practically background scenery, especially when compared to Jacqueline Hill’s history teacher.

Rewatching it in close proximity to the original TV story brought home to me how much better the latter is. Just compare the almost wordless acting of Hartnell and Russell here:

versus Cushing, Castle and Tovey playing the same scene for weak laughs here:

You can get the film here.

Obverse Books have published a novelisation of the film, ostensibly by “Alan Smithee” but I believe actually by Iain McLaughlin. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

Ian considered himself to be fit and healthy. He had been drilled into good shape during his National Service and he was still active now, playing football twice a week and turning out for the local cricket side during the summer. He also went dancing – hopefully from now on with Barbara – every weekend, but even he was feeling the effects of the journey. He was out of breath and perspiring heavily. His shirt was soaked with sweat and his muscles ached.

It made me realise that the visual comedy of the film is one of its key elements, very difficult to transfer to the printed page! Anyway, you can get it here.

So, on to the latest of the Black Archives, Oliver Wake’s monograph on The Daleks, concentrating on the original TV series but also referring to the Whitaker novelisation and the Cushing film, and to later Dalek and Terry Nation stories. There is a real break of format with previous Black Archives, with no less than eighteen short chapters each addressing a different aspect of the story, and building the overall case (which is surely unassailable anyway) that The Daleks can be seen as the crucial founding text of the show as a whole. A short introduction explains the book’s agenda:

I aim, firstly, to explore the influences and inspirations Nation called upon in devising the story; secondly, to analyse the story’s mixed authorship and the ways in which varied contributors gave it meaning; and thirdly, to examine The Daleks’ world-building as a piece of televisual fantasy fiction.

The first chapter, “Commissioning The Daleks”, recapitulates what we know about how the story came into being – it was written very quickly, which meant that it was ready for production when an early gap needed to be filled.

The second chapter, “The Bomb”, looks at how the story portrays radiation sickness and the neutron bomb.

The third chapter, “A Climate of Fear”, looks at other portrayals of the aftermath of nuclear war in fiction up to the mid-1960s. Its second paragraph is:

Stories of nuclear weapons had been science fiction and consequently were hidden away in niche publications. After the Second World War they began to emerge into the mainstream, in Britain at least; in the more conservative USA they tended to remain hived off in the sci-fi niche¹. Every conceivable scenario of nuclear devastation was played out in literature, much of it ill-informed and scientifically illiterate.
¹ Brians, Paul, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, unpaginated online edition, Chapter 1.

The fourth chapter, “The Survivors”, queries the extent to which the story is meant to show the future of Planet Earth humanity.

The fifth chapter, “The Dead Planet”, looks at the Petrified Jungle and also in some detail at the Magnadon (the dead metallic lizard).

The sixth chapter, “Alien Sound”, looks at the brilliant soundscape of the story created by Tristram Cary’s music and Brian Hodgson’s effects. As I noted earlier, this is one point where the Cushing film is seriously deficient.

The seventh chapter, “The Time Machine”, looks at the influence of Wells’ novel and George Pal’s film adaptation on The Daleks.

The eighth chapter, “The Mutants”, looks at what we are told about both Thals and Daleks as mutations, and points out the inconsistencies. (I must say I prefer this approach to desperately trying to retcon everything.)

The ninth chapter, “The Aryan Thals”, points out the problematic of the perfect Thal race being tall and blond, leaning again on The Time Machine.

The tenth chapter, “Pacifism, the Thals and Terry Nation”, goes into Nation’s well-documented political views, which he expressed as pacifist and sometimes socialist. (So Gareth Roberts is completely wrong on this, not surprisingly.) Ian’s argument with the Thals is Nation’s argument with himself.

The eleventh chapter, “Gender and Authority”, looks at the story’s problematic treatment of gender roles among the Thals and the character of Dyoni, and queries how both Thal and Dalek societies are actually governed.

The twelfth chapter, “Martians and Ants”, looks at the influence of The War of the Worlds (both the Wells novel and the 1953 film) and the early John Wyndham story “Wanderers of Time” on The Daleks.

The thirteenth chapter, “The Power (and Irradiation) of the Daleks”, looks at the Daleks’ dependence on static electricity, their life support systems, and their vulnerability to radiation, and then asks, what do they eat?

The fourteenth chapter, “Outer Space Robot People”, makes some interesting points about who the Daleks are shown to be, as opposed to later portrayals.

In their first appearance, the Daleks are scared isolationists. They are survivalists trapped in their fallout shelter, unable to go outside but possessive of the world beyond their city. This jealousy manifests as paranoia and xenophobia when the Doctor’s party and then the Thals come calling.

The fifteenth chapter, “Hideous Machine-like Creatures”, looks at the Daleks’ design and their debt to Art Deco, a topic Wake has revisited (with lots of helpful illustrations) on his Substack.

The sixteenth chapter, “The Direction of the Daleks”, calls attention to the work of Christopher Barry and Richard Martin in bringing the story (and the Daleks) alive.

The seventeenth chapter, “Extermination, Then?” looks at how the Daleks’ catchphrase slipped subtly into the script.

The eighteenth chapter, “Dal to Lek”, looks at the sources for the name Dalek. These include Wyndham’s “Wanderers of Time” and Nation’s general fondness for cycling through similar names. Wake considers and discounts the relevance of the fact that “dalek”/“daleko” means “far away” in the languages once known collectively as Serbo-Croat.

If I may divert for a moment, I am not quite so sure. My relationship with Balkan nationalisms is ambivalent, but there is a haunting Serbian First World War song, “Tamo daleko”, about the exiled remnants of the Serbian army sheltering on Corfu. (As a Serbian military friend once said to me, it’s not so much like Dire Straits’ “So Far Away From Me”, which would be a literal translation of the title, as “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, only less jolly.) I do not know if Nation was ever exposed to, say, a Serbian restaurant playing live or recorded folk music, or some other aspect of Serbian culture, but I can imagine him hearing this song somewhere, somehow, and “daleko” sticking in his subconscious memory. It is the heavily emphasised second word of each of the first three verses; even if you don’t speak any Serbian, it is difficult to miss.

A brief conclusion pulls all this together and looks at questions of authorship.

An even briefer note looks at one of the story’s many variant titles, “Beyond the Sun”, and how this might have come to be.

I was a bit worried at first that I wasn’t going to like this Black Archive; Wake’s style starts out a little jerky. But he settles down fairly quickly and delivers a must-read analysis of one of the most important Doctor Who stories. You can get it here.

The newly recovered Doctor Who episodes, and the foolish commentary of Gareth Roberts

Posted on 11 April 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Like a lot of you I was tremendously excited and pleased to hear last month that two of the missing episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan had been found, and what’s more that they would be released on iPlayer at Easter weekend. I have been a huge fan of The Daleks’ Master Plan since I first listened to it in 2007, and also enjoyed the Big Finish sort-of follow-up stories (there’s a great First Doctor / Second Doctor crossover called Daughter of the Gods). And over Eastercon I sneaked aside for an hour to watch the new discoveries.

The first episode, “The Nightmare Begins”, pleased me beyond my expectations. Hartnell has taken on the mantle of being the action hero of the story in a way that would have been unthinkable when he first started the show two years earlier. There is lots of Sixties angst about world government, peace, and combat in jungles (this is not Vietnam, but Malaysia, possibly Kenya, and going back a bit further Burma and Nagaland). The most important human being is visibly not a white man (though played, shamefully, by a blacked-up white actor). Women give men orders. And the Daleks are back. The BBC are very lucky that the first of the two recovered episodes is really one of the good ones. (Though it’s difficult to think of a lost Hartnell episode which is likely to have been a complete dud.)

The third episode, “Devil’s Planet”, isn’t quite as good, but it’s still attractive, with some great lines, as the Doctor shows his technological snobbery about the stolen ‘Spar’ spaceship. One wonders a bit about the prison planet Desperus. Are there any, er, women there? And where do raw materials and food come from? But it’s far from the least plausible planet ever seen on Doctor Who, or even in this story. And the ending of the episode, with Katarina held prisoner at knifepoint, is genuinely tense – especially when you know what happens next.

I’m also really delighted that Alan Stevens, whose work on Blake’s 7 and The Prisoner I have previously enjoyed, is publishing a book about The Daleks’ Master Plan in August.

One of the more bizarre reactions to the recovery of the two episodes was a piece in The Spectator by Gareth Roberts. Roberts, in case you missed the memo, wrote or co-wrote six episodes of New Who, nine stories of The Sarah Jane Adventures and ten Doctor Who novels, but was basically booted out of the Whoniverse in 2019 for his offensive tweets about trans women. (He was also pretty offensive about Muslims.)

Since then he has gone full-on culture warrior for the Right, and has been a regular writer in The Spectator since 2022. This week’s piece on “The surprising conservatism of the old Doctor Who” (I won’t link, but you can evade the paywall easily enough), asserts but fails to prove that Terry Nation, the writer of the story, and Douglas Camfield, the director, were “unusually politically conservative”.

Of course, what you get from art is often what you bring to it, but most people would agree that Doctor Who leans left – see, for instance, Alex Wilcock’s classic essay “How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal”. Malcolm Hulke, one of the classic series’ more prolific writers, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Roberts’ evidence to the contrary is slim to the point of invisibility.

Roberts starts by pointing out (entirely correctly) that Nation’s writing “is often of the two-fisted war story kind, often featuring – as here – desperate commando missions in jungle terrain.” There’s nothing particularly right-wing about war stories in the context of mid-twentieth-century Britain. Bear in mind that the 1945 election was swung to Labour by the mailed-in votes of soldiers in the field. Roberts also points out that the (fascinating) scene set in the space command centre is implicitly critical of the complacent and affluent society of Earth in the year 4000. Again, nothing very right-wing about that.

In any case, the idea that the creator of Blake’s 7, which is about rebels against a militaristic regime led by a woman, was “unusually politically conservative” is ridiculous. Terry Nation often wrote about politics; but his strength was satire, coming as he did from comedy, and he applied his satire liberally to all. In “The Secret Invasion”, a Dalek novella published in 1979 but set in 1974, we read:

Now two more men were hurrying toward the conference room. One wore spectacles and a worried expression. The other had a fawn raincoat and was smoking a pipe. He reminded David of Mike Yarwood.

Emilie nudged her brother excitedly and whispered, ‘That’s Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary. And that’s the Prime Minister.’

David stared. ‘That’s not Mr Heath,’ he said derisively.

‘Of course it’s not,’ Emilie said impatiently. ‘It’s Mr Wilson’s turn this month.’ Emilie knew about politics.

As for Camfield, Roberts presents little evidence about his political views, other than that he had wanted a military career (but was ruled out on health grounds), and was friends with a right-wing writer. (A number of people in Doctor Who fandom used to be friends with a right-wing writer, before Roberts pushed them away.)

And Roberts presents literally no evidence that Camfield’s political views, whatever they may have been, had any influence on his work. True, he “conducted his TV work with incredibly precise and indeed military levels of planning”, but this is hardly an ideological quality. Looking in the other direction, it will not take you long to think of several examples of utterly incompetent and disorganised right-wing leaders.

I strongly recommend Michael Seely’s biography of Camfield, which goes deeply into his work but has little to say about his politics. There is a case to be made about his political views – apparently he opposed the closed shop, though as far as I recall this was a pretty centrist position in the 1970s – but you won’t find it in Roberts’ article, which is an intellectually lazy attempt to project the culture wars of today onto a TV show made before either of us was born (and I turn 59 in two weeks), written to confirm Spectator readers in their somewhat uncomfortable prejudices.

But do go and watch The Daleks’ Master Plan. It’s brilliant (what there is of it).

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The Daleks, by Oliver Waite (and Terry Nation, and David Whitaker, and “Alan Smithee”)

The newly recovered Doctor Who episodes, and the foolish commentary of Gareth Roberts