C01S02 The Daleks

Synopsis

The TARDIS lands in an alien, petrified jungle, beyond which lies a mysterious, deserted city.  The Doctor insists on exploring, but before long the TARDIS crew all begin experiencing the early effects of radiation sickness.  And then they discover that the metal city isn't as deserted as they first thought...

Cover notes

The Daleks!  Every great hero has a great enemy, and in the Doctor's case, it was the very first alien race the series introduced to its audience.

Writer Terry Nation shared an agent with David Whitaker, who was appointed as story editor to Doctor Who in mid-1963.  Whitaker was given the onerous task of assembling a set of stories for the programme's first year.  He approached Terry Nation, who despite initial reservations was soon on-board.

Nation was born in 1930.  He was 9 years old at the outbreak of World War II, and the horror of this global conflict would make a huge impression on him.  The two main themes that he would later pick up in his first Dalek story were the Nazis' threat of racial extermination, and the underlying menace of advanced warfare, as epitomised by the nuclear weapons that were used to bring the war to a close by the Allies.  He set his story on Skaro, a planet that had been devastated by a terrible atomic war.  The Daleks were an expression of Nation's enduring fear of Nazism and its associations.  But what would they look like?

Nation's original storyline just describes the Daleks as, "four terrifying machine-like creatures" - which didn't give much in the way of detail for the story's designer to work with.  This task fell to BBC staff designer Raymond Cusick, who came up with the idea of having machines with no visible legs.  This then inspired Nation to suggest to him that the Dalek movement could be based on the Geogian State Dancers - whose feet and legs are hidden by long, hooped skirts, giving the appearance that they glide across the floor.  To demonstrate this design idea to director Christopher Barry over lunch a few days later, Cusick began pushing a pepper-pot across the table they were dining at.  The classic, iconic Dalek design was born.

Early reaction to Doctor Who was very good, but as soon as the Daleks appeared, interest in the series rocketed.  Doctor Who's early success was due in no small part to the impact the Daleks made on the viewing public, and a rematch was soon being planned.

This story would become the basis for the very first novelisation of the series, and would also be re-made as a big-screen adventure, titled Dr. Who and the Daleks, starring Peter Cushing as Dr. Who.  It is no exaggeration to say that this is the single most important story in the history of Doctor Who.  Without the Daleks, Doctor Who could easily have been a mere footnote in the annals of TV science fiction.  But more than forty years later, Doctor Who - and the Daleks themselves - are still going strong.

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