When I was very small indeed I had a set of skittles in the shape of Captain Snort and His Soldier Boys, who used to rattle along in an humpetty bumpetty army truck. There was also a farmer who had a modern mechanical farm with a tractor and a miller who milled the corn to make the bread in an old fashioned windmill and sometimes got drunk on cider. He really did sometimes get drunk on cider even though Trumpton was a show for pre-schoolers. (The thing about Master Bates and Seaman Stains is not true, though, and never was.) The soldiers wore red uniforms and Quality Street hats, with their musket, fife and drum. I see now that they were toys and hence could be Napoleonic and contemporary at the same time. It took me a long time to understand how the guard that periodically changed outside Buckingham Palace and the life sized khaki Action Men that you sometimes saw at county fairs were both soldiers.
The Daleks are a bit like that.
There were Dalek toys before ever there were Doctor Who toys. It was 1976 before you could get a Doctor Who action figure. It looked absolutely nothing like him. But you could buy little plastic Daleks in Woolworths as early as 1965. They cost a shilling, which is about £1.80 in modern money, which is quite a lot for what they were. I suppose Dinky or Corgi or someone made a die-cast Bessie?
Was Dalekmania actually a thing? The story about the little boy who slept under a Dalek sheet wearing Dalek pyjamas, washed with Dalek soap and did his homework in a Dalek exercise book with a Dalek pencil sounds like the kind of thing a journalist would make up. They told the same story about Roy Rogers in the 1940s. In the 1970s there was a slightly muted attempt to invent something called Womblemania.
There were definitely Dalek toys. Or there had been. I was born too late and missed out on all the good stuff.
There had always been Dalek toys. A child's bedroom, with a teddy bear and a rocking horse and some toys soldiers and a golly and some Daleks, what could be more natural? (I actually did have a golly. We have covered this previously.)
There was a slot machine Dalek in the penny arcade at Clacton where for a penny or a shilling or five-of-your-new-pence you could get spun around and say exterminate, exterminate, exterminate if it took your fancy. And people definitely ran round the playground shouting exterminate, exterminate, exterminate at each other.
I still cannot hear that word without thinking of Daleks, whether in the context of pesticide or in — some other context.
In a way, the slot machine Dalek was the real Dalek because you could touch it and get inside it and the TV Dalek was small and fuzzy and usually still in black and white.
Of all the things that Father Christmas bought me in 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1979, the Dalek Annuals are the onwa I still own and which still live on my shelves. Terry Nation's Dalek Annual it said on the cover. Terry Nation had a bloody cheek, or put another way, Terry Nation had a very shrewd business head. He was a very fine story teller and could spin a very fine yarn and would have never been out of work even if he hadn’t accidentally thought up the Daleks in 1963. Blake’s 7 and Survivors stand up better than most Doctor Who. But the comics and annuals and sweet cigarette cards sold in truck loads because of the Dalek’s shape, and the Dalek’s shape was invented by a BBC set designer who got a small bonus but no royalties. The Dalek Annuals contained reprints of the Dalek Comic strips from TV Century 21 and short stories about humans fighting Daleks which were probably pitches for a TV show he could never quite persuade the BBC to make and bits of free-floating mythos, maps of Skaro and cutaways of Dalek spaceships. The comic strips said Created By Terry Nation even though they were written by David Whittaker and drawn by Ron Turner and others.
The mythos spilled onto the wrappers of a chocolate and peppermint lolly. (Not frozen ice popsicles but ice-cream on a stick, is there a word for that?) Dalek Death Rays: somehow the colour green was thought to signify Dalekhood. (There was a Dracula ice lolly at the same time, very dark blackcurrant ice, with white ice-cream and red jelly inside. Someone at Walls Ice Cream must have had a touch of the Willy Wonka about him.) They had plastic sticks, instead of wooden ones, with coded messages, not corny jokes. The wrappers told you facts about how the Daleks had tried biological warfare on the humans in the 1600s and how they had a special paint that made them invisible. I am not sure if that would work. Some of them might have been drawn by Frank Bellamy.
The Idea of the Daleks. Even the cartoon strip, which was cutting edge in England in the 1960s, evaporates like space-fog if you actually try to read it. Robot armies and space cruisers and floating hover pods and an emperor with a gigantic head and these obviously impractical mechanical creatures with a thing inside them you are never, ever, ever allowed to see. (Were there Dalek changing rooms or Dalek swimming pools where it was okay for them to take off their metal casings provided they didn’t stare?)
Someone once said that the Marx Brothers had never been in a movie as good as they were. The Daleks were like that.
But the Daleks were also this weeks adversary on a TV show that went out on BBC 1 which was normally good, occasionally excellent, but frequently not very good at all, a TV show that everybody watched but hardly anyone paid much attention to. It was The Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company Limited, and it was all there was. And while it is true that the Daleks appeared more often than any other bad guy, it is also true that five out of six Doctor Who episodes didn’t have any Daleks at all in them.
The producers didn’t like them much because they were huge clumsy props; and the writers didn’t like them much because it is fairly hard to write monosyllabic staccato dialogue that doesn’t sound terrible, and the actors didn’t like them much because what actor does like acting at a prop where the voice is going to be dubbed in afterwards. Terry Nation was the only person who was allowed to write Dalek stories and he had long ago lost interest.
When I started going to Doctor Who conventions, there was a ritual question without which no production team Q&A panel was ever complete.
“Are you going to bring back any old monsters?”
By which we meant, of course, “Will we ever get to see the Daleks again?”
And the answer was always some polite variation on “Not if we can possibly avoid it?”
