Doctor Who and The Daleks / Dalek Invasion Earth 2150

 Cabots Circus Bristol


I am so nostalgic for the 1960s. Sugar Puffs posters. Tube lines with signs that say "To The Trains." Roberta Tovey's little blue anorak.

These films were made before I was born. They have passed through old-fashioned, become period and are on the point of being timeless. There is a card at the beginning about all the work that has been done restoring them, as if they were major works of art and not just hastily assembled tie-in. But much kudos to whoever decided to make the poster and the intermission card in the style of the Doctor Who And The Daleks Give-A-Show Projector. The Give-A-Show projector was the first piece of Doctor Who merchandise. I never had it, but I had the Disney one. These films come from that particular vanished world.

They are not blockbusters. They were never intended to compete with James Bond. Perhaps there is something of Thunderbirds in the second film, when the flying saucer crashes into the mineshaft and explodes. (You can see the wires, very nearly.) There are not a lot of "special" effects, but there is a lot of fire, explosions, pyrotechnics. An awful lot of I imagine quite expensive props get smashed into little pieces.

I think they were intended for Saturday Morning Pictures, which still existed. Michael Rodd talked endlessly about something called the Children's Film Foundation but no CFF movie came to any cinema in my galaxy. The Odeon showed The Aristocats and One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing and Tom Sawyer with songs. But there were apparently still places where kids could go, unaccompanied, and watch some cartoons and a low budget movie about lower class kids foiling smugglers. I suppose it was economic to show something when the cinema would otherwise have been closed. We went decimal in 1972 but I am pretty sure tickets were still sixpence.

The closest I ever came to Saturday Morning Pictures was at Butlins. The Children's Theatre had old, old Woody Woodpecker cartoons and a conjuror or a ventriloquist. One year it rained so much that they put on an extra film in the afternoon. It was At The Earth's Core with Peter Cushing as a mad scientist. It wasn't very good but it was a film and it was raining. One year the Cricket was rained off and BBC2 showed Doctor Who and the Daleks in the sports slot. It was the kind of movie that no-one wanted to watch but no-one minded watching. At the very first ever Doctor Who convention they showed Dalek Invasion Earth in the dead-dog slot on Sunday Night. Jeremy Bentham (not that Jeremy Bentham) said that it was a chance to rekindle Dalekmania.

The Beatles appeared at the Palladium in October 1963; Doctor Who started a month later; the Daleks first appeared at Christmas. I don't know if contemporary newspapers ever actually called it Dalekmania. In the 1970 there was a kids TV show about animated rats and for a while demand for tie-in toys exceeded supply: I remember that being called Womblemania. 

So, the Double Bill, on a big screen, as a one-off. 

Not so much adaptations as exercises in One Film To The Tune Of Another: Terry Nation supplies the lyrics and 1960s kids movies supply the melody. Or maybe they just got rid of a lot of padding. Doctor Who and the Daleks runs to 82 minutes; the Dead Planet ran to 175. 

Roy Castle was the kind of TV personality which doesn't really exist any more. No-one quite remembered what he was famous for; but you couldn't turn the TV on without him being there. He had in fact started life as a tap-dancer but could turn his hand to stand-up and ventriloquism and conjuring and had a straight part in Carry On Up the Kyber. One of his stunts was to put a mouth piece on a kettle and play it like a trumpet. There was a cartoon in a fanzine of a man with his mouth round a sink-plunger, while a man with a clapperboard said "Very droll, Mr Castle, but can we please get on with the film?" But mostly he was just Nice which earned him a long career as a children's TV presenter. He remained Nice even when he had terminal cancer. ("I can honestly say that I am happy to be appearing live....") Clearly, he was the worst possible person to have cast as Ian Chesterton, the sensible, heroic, square jawed, ex-military Chemistry Teacher around whom the original show revolved. Castle turns Ian into a second rate Norman Wisdom, unable to walk across any room without some kind of pratfall. He even has to do an automatic door routine; around a door which only opens when you sit on a nearby chair. Why the bottomless Daleks have chairs in their city is not covered. 

And yet it is to the utter credit of both him and the producer that at no point is one inclined to think "Oh, god, that role has been miscast". Throughout the movie, one is thinking, oh, dear, that nice Mr Roy off the Record Breakers has somehow got stuck on an alien planet, and is completely out of his depth, exploring alien cities, leaping across chasms and getting punched in the face by alien pacifists." It actually rather touching when he blanches at the prospect of climbing an alien cliff and then says, feebly, "I was thinking of Barbara." 

I am not quite sure if the main character is actually called Doctor Who. Roy calls him that, but it would be very much in character for Roy to have got the wrong end of the stick. But it is indubitably the case that this Doctor is a human who has spent many years constructing the TARDIS (always referred to simply as "TARDIS") in his garden. It has clearly been cobbled together from bits and bobs. There is a row of clip boards hanging on a wire, like in a hospital. In the second film, it has acquired Star Trek style control panels, which feel a lot less Whovian. The explanations of how TARDIS comes to be bigger on the inside are quite a lot more evocative than anything in the TV show. 

"In electrokinetic theory space expands to accommodate the time necessary to encompass its dimensions." 

"Just as time is regarded as the fourth dimension, so space is equally the fifth dimension. For space knows no boundaries and is completely timeless."

Susan and Barbara live with the Doctor and are said to be his grandchildren. (In the second film, Barbara is replaced by the indistinguishable Louise who is the Doctor's niece and therefore presumably Susan's Aunt.) Susan dropped out of the TV show in 1964, but there was still a kind of race-memory which said that Doctor Who was the adventures of an old boy and his grandkids. John and Gillian were written out of TV Comic as late as 1968.

Doctor Who without the Doctor is not a much more sensible proposition than Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. At best, Peter Cushing is playing the popular memory of William Hartnell ("a crotchety old man") at worst, he's Van Helsing with a false moustache. He is occasionally a little bit funny, but he is never mysterious or dangerous. More than once, he raised his hand to make a scientific point and I half expected him to blow up the planet Alderaan. It makes one realise how much of Old Who relied on character: once you take out William Hartnell's charisma and the tension between him and Ian, there is really not that much left. The one interesting character is Susan, or indeed Suzie. It's as if someone vaguely recalled that the first episode of Doctor Who was called An Unearthly Child and decided to make her more unearthly and more childish. A kid of about eight who talks entirely in technobabble is not entirely original, but is reasonably compelling. There is a hint that she has a secret, a bond with Grandad Who that we don't know, but it is never developed. Sometime he treats her as the only other grown up; sometime he lifts her up and hugs her. (He mercifully omits the line about giving her a jolly good etc etc etc)

It is hard to imagine someone looking at Carol-Anne Ford's performance and thinking "It would be so much better if she was about nine?" But it is possible to imagine someone looking at a script and assuming that Susan was a little girl of nine. The opening scenes in Doctor Who's sitting room make a great deal of sense if you assume that Milton Subotsky had the script of Dead Planet in front of him, and, without any knowledge of An Unearthly Child, extrapolated a back story from internal evidence. (The opening chapter of David Whitaker's snappily titled Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks is clearly written by someone with an awareness of the TV episode, even though he departs significantly from it.) 

To try to fit this story in with any kind of linear view of Doctor Who history is obviously futile. I suppose the Doctor could be pretending to be human for some reason, or to have been fooling around with one of those Time Lord pocket watches out of Human Nature. You can mutter "parallel world" or "multiverse" if it makes you feel happier. We're watching the same story told in a different way. 

The specific changes are quite interesting. In the TV serial, Heroic Ian has the idea of pretending that he is going to hand Alydon's girlfriend over to the Daleks, in order to demonstrate to the pacifist Thals that there are some things worth fighting for. In the movie, this ruse is the Doctor's idea. He winks to Roy so he knows he doesn't mean it, but Roy still ends up getting punched. It's a terrible argument, the same terrible argument which was used against conscientious objectors in the second world war. ("You are prepared to punch an individual on the jaw, therefore you should be prepared to risk nuclear annihilation.") But I have to say that it is a very good scene. 

There's also a sustained sequence in the TV serial in which Ian and some Thals have to jump across a chasm while exploring tunnels outside the Dalek city. Ganatos, who has already been shown to be a coward misses his footing, and falls into the chasm, pulling Ian, who he is roped to, after him. Ganatos finds his courage and cuts the rope, falling to his death to save the others. In the movie, everyone looks sad for a bit, and then Ganatos calls out "Won't someone get me out of here!" He wasn't dead after all! Maybe noble self-sacrifice was a bit too scary for Saturday Morning Pictures, but it renders the scene distinctly pointless. 

Big budgets mean big casts; when the Thals invade the Dalek city there are a decent number of extras in silly make up and the line stretches out to the crack of doom. When the Boss Dalek speaks to the other Daleks before the big battle, he seems to be addressing a crowd of dozens, and there are no obvious cardboard cutouts. The shot of the Gold Dalek filmed upside down from floor level is rather arresting. It is hard to do actual action sequences with legless motorised dustbins, and there is rather too much reliance on pushing them down lift shafts and spinning them round so their weapons exterminate each other. I rather like the fact that they have fire extinguishers and flame throwers rather than that funny photo negative effect the BBC liked.

Doctor Who and the Daleks works well enough as a kids film. It is not Doctor Who as it was, but Doctor Who has we remembered it; Doctor Who for fourteen year olds who were twelve when it started. Skaro is dangerous and even scary, but it is fantasy danger and fantasy scares. An alien city populated by life-sized Dalek toys. 

Dalek Invasion Earth is both better and worse. It is hamstrung by its source material: Terry Nation wrote a dystopian post-apocalyptic Earth Under the Martians vibe, a strong precursor to both Blakes Seven and Survivors. Phillip Madoc has a brief cameo as a nasty war profiteer who betrays our heroes to the Daleks. He says he only cares about himself, pauses, and grins; it's a wonder he doesn't regenerate into Paul Darrow on the spot. There's also a suicidal wheelchair bound rebel leader and an heroic tough guy who in a different life would have been in a guitar band. They're not as grimdark as they were on the telly, but they are very different from the over-made up elves who inhabited Skaro.

Roy Castle has been replaced by Bernard Cribbins. Cribbins is given a new character, a policeman who blunders into TARDIS while investigating a jewel robbery. Like Castle, he's a nice guy who appears on children's TV, sing songs, tells jokes, and does the voices for the Wombles. He is still comic relief: at one point he dons crash helmet and fetish gear and tries to fall in with a squad of zombified Robo-Men, and the film goes full Marx Brothers. But on the whole he is more heroic and less silly than Roy, and therefore a lot less fun. Susan is a couple of years older than she was but still the same character; Barbara has been replaced by Louise. The big shiny tonka toy Daleks have turned back into standard issue BBC blue and grey models. 

Some people might think that Daleks are more scary, more incongruous, more Dalek-like when they are parading through London streets, blowing up tool-sheds and being crashed into by transit vans. Others might think they are essentially fairy tale creatures and only belong in a world of mercury swamps and petrified jungles. (We might discuss the lavatory facilities for legendary Tibetan creatures visiting South London.) The set piece of the flying Dalek hovercraft landing in a London bomb site, with rebels and Daleks and Robomen facing off in wide-screen glory is enough to make anyone with an extensive collection of Dalek figurines grin from ear to ear. The Daleks' plan (to dig a very deep hole and steal the earths magnetic core) is still nonsense; and the Doctor's solution (to put some planks of wood in the mineshaft so the bomb goes the wrong way, and, er, magnetises everything) is still unconvincing, and it still doesn't matter.

Terry Nation sure does like the plot device in which the baddie shows his hand by knowing a piece of information that the goodies haven't told him yet. He sure does like the device of the goodie giving the baddies orders and sticking "this order cannot be countermanded" at the end.

Not classics, then, but pivotal moments in the reception history of Doctor Who. Some six weeks after Dalek Invasion Earth hit UK cinemas, the Cybermen appeared on TV sets and William Hartnell (accompanied by a couple of youngsters from swinging London) metaphorphosed into Patrick Troughton. Even when they were brand new, these films were relics of a bygone age.


2 comments:

Richard Worth said...

Out of curiosity, do we know what certificate the movies got from the British Board of Film Censors when they first came out? It would be interesting if they saw it as a kids adventure story (babes-in-arms not admitted) or Quatermas-lite.

Stephen Watson said...

According to IMDb, both were originally U. Dalek Invasion got upgraded to a PG on re-release.