Death to the Daleks

This is the third in a serious of Doctor Who blips celebrating the show's 50th anniversary. Here are links to the first and second.

Although I'm an avid Doctor Who fan I've never been particularly fond of the homicidal pepperpots that are the best-known baddies in the series. I suspect that a major reason for this was the daleks' transition from the cunning strategists of their early appearances (which I've only really seen as an adult) to the Terminator-style unstoppable killing machines that I recognise from my childhood. Still, I can't see that I can do this series of reviews without mentioning them somewhere so I'll mention them here as I suspect that it was during the tenure of Jon Pertwee, the third actor to play the Doctor, that this happened and Death to the Daleks is probably the last adventure in which we see a masterplan almost come together.

Pertwee's era was a major time of change, and not just with the Daleks. Up until this point there had been a formulaic construction to the TARDIS crew - the Doctor had at least two companions, one to act as damsel in distress (and usually ask the awkward questions that allowed the scriptwriters to revel in truckloads of exposition) and a hero type to act as muscle when necessary. Pertwee was keen to be an action hero himself so the latter role disappeared from the roster.

The second major change was the introduction of colour broadcasting - all Hartnell and Troughton's adventures had been shot and broadcast in black and white while 1970 was clearly considered to be modern enough to introduce colour.

Third, Pertwee's Doctor was stranded on Earth for much of his tenure. One of Troughton's last adventures, The Invasion, had involved some images of Cybermen invading London and it had been extremely well received, in large part because of the familiarity of the setting. The production team decided to make a virtue of this and stranded the Doctor on Earth in a contemporary period. The fact that this saved a significant amount of money in sets was a useful bonus.

But perhaps the biggest change wasn't immediately visible. A former army officer and policeman who had submitted a couple of scripts during Troughton's era started to take more of a hand in the series' stories. Robert Holmes believed that Doctor Who worked best when it was genuinely frightening and when it borrowed more from the horror genre than science fiction. Given how popular Holmes' stories remain with Doctor Who fans it seems he wasn't alone in this as he gave us shop dummies coming to life, creatures killing off a spaceship crew one by one (Ridley Scott, himself a former Doctor Who production assistant from the Hartnell era, borrowed heavily on Holmes' Ark in Space in scripting the film Alien) and Egyptian gods imprisoned on Mars. Russell T. Davies, the man who revived the series in 2005, said in an interview with the Telegraph: "Take The Talons of Weng-Chiang, for example. Watch episode one. It's the best dialogue ever written. It's up there with Dennis Potter. By a man called Robert Holmes. When the history of television drama comes to be written, Robert Holmes won't be remembered at all because he only wrote genre stuff. And that, I reckon, is a real tragedy." My view is that without Holmes' work as author and editor Doctor Who would never have made it into the 1980s. let alone be one of the BBC's biggest properties over thirty years later.

All of which is rather too much preamble to say much about the adventure Death to the Daleks in which humans and daleks are trying to mine an important element off a distant planet. The daleks stitch up the humans in every way possible but are ultimately defeated by the human capacity for self-sacrifice. In much of this the Doctor unusually acts more as catalyst than protagonist. Right - let's go and watch something else without daleks...