My first memory of Doctor Who was the Daleks.
We were living in Canada and the show...
I think the show probably came out the same year there,
and we didn't know what we were watching,
and I wasn't really aware of the Doctor,
but I do remember the bit where the squirmy black thing crawls out
and that blew my mind.
The Daleks and the squirmy black thing stayed in my mind forever.
McCOY: I used to live in this Bohemian house in Belsize Park.
One of the guys in it had a television and we would meet...
There were three of us. We would meet for the results of the football pools.
And he would supply the television, I would supply the soup
and our friend Stella Dequincy supplied the cigarettes.
And we would sit there in our poverty
and watch to see if we were going to become rich.
And then this programme came on afterwards, which we kind of watched,
which was Patrick Troughton playing Doctor Who,
and we became totally addicted and forgot about the pools.
I do remember William Hartnell, but I mostly remember Patrick Troughton
and Jon Pertwee. I think they were my Doctors.
And I was terrified, especially of the Daleks.
Really terrified. And I was classic,
hiding behind the sofa or watching through the crack in the door.
- Ben, when did you first become a... - Oh, that was Day of the Daleks.
That's my first Dalek story that I remember.
And so, for me, they're inextricably linked with
people in slightly dodgy camouflage uniforms
and guns with fins on them.
The first stories I remember are Jon Pertwee stories
and I must have seen Daleks.
I mean, they... But they were sort of in the public psyche.
My brother and I had little Dalek models
that were on sort of ball bearings underneath.
I think they were, and they sort of rolled around
and we used to sit in the bath with the Daleks,
rolling them round the edge of the bath and things... Doing all that stuff.
And in the playground, we used to play Daleks
and do all that kind of "I will exterminate",
and all that stuff, it was great.
Yeah, it was completely part of my childhood.
Loved Doctor Who.
Doctor.
Now do you understand?
Move back.
We'd only really just come out of, you know, the Second World War.
We were still kind of living through that in a way,
and the thing about the Daleks were, it was like the massive tanks,
person-like tanks, a one-person tank en masse.
It was a blitzkrieg and I think that's what frightened everybody.
Daleks! Move it!
I think that we were itching to do a Dalek story from way back
and it was just... John was waiting for the correct moment to do it.
John would dispense the monsters like somebody who's dispensing sweets.
I had a lot of terrific writers, but Ben was the one who was most
congenial to the show.
He got the show and he got science fiction
in a way that other people didn't.
And I really knew that the Daleks were the best villains
and I wanted to apply the best Doctor Who writer
who I had in my stable to do that.
And I knew that Ben would love it and I knew that it would be
a marriage made in hell, in the best possible way.
You have to imagine, I'm a young writer, it's my very first gig
and I walk into John Nathan-Turner's extremely eccentric office.
I mean, most of the offices in the BBC,
they look like people, basically, do their accounts in them.
And you walk into John's office, and it was just stuffed
with Doctor Who stuff.
I mean, it was painted black and it was full of smoke
because John was a heavy smoker. And so was I, so that was fine.
It used to drive Andrew Cartmel insane.
But there was basically a wall of videotapes,
and this was back in the day when a wall of videotapes
was quite a rare thing outside of the industry.
And it was all the Doctor Whos and I wasn't a fan-fan,
so I didn't have the collection of Doctor Who videos
that I found out was de rigueur for every, you know, Doctor Who fan.
And there they were, all these ones I'd missed on television.
I went, "Oh great," and I just, essentially, took it home.
Ben, do you remember thinking about that
and coming up with the '63 stuff when it came in?
The '63 stuff, I seem to remember that was pretty much...
Pretty much our first thought.
"We'll do a Dalek story. It's the 25th anniversary, let's set in 1963."
As it was the 25th anniversary year, you could see that there was
a very, sort of, concerted effort to bring in lots of elements
from the show's past.
For instance, they went back to the junkyard in Totters Lane
where the first episode had been set.
Which was a really nice thing for fans to spot and recognise,
but it might have been a bit confusing to more casual viewers
who didn't really know what was going on.
Or had perhaps just seen another story just two or three years earlier
where they'd gone back to the junkyard and it was a completely different place.
(BEEPING)
The school where all the action took place was the Coal Hill School,
which is the school that Susan Foreman had enrolled in back in 1963.
So it was quite fun going back there.
Wait in here please, Susan. I won't be long.
That was some of the thought behind An Unearthly Child,
that you wanted this very mundane setting that the kids could relate to.
But having the Daleks running around and shooting in the school was just,
it was just great.
I quite like the, sort of, self-referencing programmes.
I think it's quite nice. It's great for the fans to,
sort of, be spotting things.
As Ace wandered around, she found Susan's book, The French Revolution.
Looked slightly different, but that didn't matter.
It was all part of the fun of the story.
I watched The Unearthly Child. I watched Carole's performance
and, hopefully, replicated it in the schoolroom.
That's not right.
- Matthews is hurt. - Where are they?
Pamela Salem, who played the part of Rachel,
looked a bit like Barbara Wright.
I don't know if that was intentional, but certainly with her hair and clothes,
she was a bit of a dead ringer for her.
- What do you make of that? - It's a playground.
The burn marks. See them?
Landing pattern of some kind of spacecraft, isn't it?
Very good.
But this is Earth, 1963.
Well, someone would have noticed. I'd have heard about it.
Do you remember the Zygon Gambit with the Loch Ness Monster?
Or the yetis in the Underground?
There was some lovely references to the past in Remembrance of the Daleks.
Just in passing, the Doctor would mention the Zygon Gambit
or the yeti in the Underground.
Complete touchdown procedure.
Things like that, they're like a reward for people
that had followed the show for years.
It didn't matter if you didn't know these stories,
but if you were a fan, it was very exciting.
It will interfere with the Daleks' control systems.
I rigged something like it on Spiridon.
Now!
Hold on! Hold on! Got this side.
Hold onto it.
Hold onto it!
For a man who abhors violence,
I must say I took great satisfaction in doing that.
It never occurred to me not to put references in, to be totally honest.
You have 25... I mean, the series was older than I was.
Whatever fired that weapon's trapped in there. There's no way out.
- How can you be sure? - I've been here before.
I never thought of it in terms of, like, deliberate referencing.
I didn't even know there was a controversy about this sort of thing.
I never thought of it in terms of, "You have to have continuity."
I just thought, "Ooh, there's this stuff and you can put it in.
"Yeah! Let's put it in." You know, basically, that's what I did.
So that metal thing had a creature inside controlling it?
Exactly, and ever since the Daleks were created,
they've tried to conquer and enslave as much of the universe
as they get their grubby little protuberances on.
- And now they want to conquer the Earth. - Nothing so mundane.
They conquer the Earth in the 22nd century.
The two factions of Daleks came from the fact that,
unlike in earlier periods of Doctor Who, you weren't allowed to kill people
with gay abandon on screen.
And I wanted lots of explosions and lots of deaths.
And so the best way to do that was to have Daleks shooting other Daleks.
I mean, I wanted big Dalek battles. Bangs.
Retreat!
When I did the research, of course, I came across Revelation of the Daleks,
and there you have the grey Daleks basically turning up
to take Davros away.
And I thought their track record on controlling Davros is so poor,
they're going to get back to Skaro and Davros is going to take, like,
six weeks and he's going to be controlling them again
and reshaping them in his image.
And then I thought, well, then you've got the renegade factions
of those Daleks that go, "No, we're not having this!
"This is not pure Dalekness.
"We're going to go away. We're going to fight you and run a guerrilla campaign."
So you basically had the Imperial Daleks,
which were the ones run by Davros.
These new cream, you know, nice gold baubles and everything.
And, basically, you were going to have one of the evil, kind of, basic Daleks,
the grey Daleks, who were like conservative Daleks.
Originally, the two factions of the Daleks were designated
red Daleks and blue factions purely
so in script terms, I could tell them apart.
I certainly think that the colours we chose were much better,
'cause red and blue, they're a bit too festive, aren't they?
I just think it's a bit too light and festive.
Yeah, so I preferred the colour scheme that we went for in this.
Sophie was in this room and the television comes on,
"And now we bring you a new programme, Doc..."
(IMITATES SCENE ENDING ABRUPTLY) I love that joke.
ANNOUNCER ON TV: The time is 5:15
and Saturday viewing continues with an adventure
in the new science-fiction series, Doctor...
I couldn't resist it. 1963. You set something in 1963,
you're going to have the famous Doctor Who meta-references,
as I've been told it's called, the famous Doctor Who meta-reference.
I just didn't think anything of it. I just threw it in as a one-off joke.
It's like the Bernard Quatermass joke, it's just thrown in there.
- Coming, Professor Jensen? - Of course, Miss Williams.
I wish Bernard was here.
British Rocket Group's got its own problems.
No one told me you weren't supposed to do stuff like that.
And it never occurred to me that anyone would find it odd or find it weird.
And they labelled it when they shot it.
Now I would make absolutely sure that it was clear
that that was just a background thing
that you weren't supposed to, you know, focus in on the TV as you...
And for everybody else, it was supposed to be dark, okay?
It's not my fault they didn't do day-for-night in those days, so...
Dark. It was supposed to be dark.
It was supposed to be the right time of November and everything. So there.
I think that if we had been suggesting that it actually was Doctor Who
that was about to be broadcast, that would have been a terrible idea,
because how could it be reality and also a TV show at the same time?
But in our minds, we knew exactly what that show was going to be.
Although it was a tease for the audience,
and perhaps people were supposed to think exactly what you thought,
that show was actually going to be Buzz and Neil's Adventures on the Moon.
'Cause in this alternate universe, Doctor Who was real,
but the moon landing would have been a work of fiction.
Now, perhaps, Doctor, you could tell me what is going on.
You must pull your men back now. It's our only chance.
It's preposterous. We can't disengage now.
Whatever is in there, my men can handle it. Sergeant.
- Listen to me, Brigadier. - Group Captain. Group Captain Gilmore.
I think if you're going to write an upright, stalwart, intelligent,
heroic military character, there's gonna be a certain amount of convergence.
And if you've been watching a lot of old Doctor Who episodes,
I'm sure the Brig was rattling around in Ben's mind.
We're not exactly spies here at UNIT.
Then what do you do, exactly?
We deal with the odd, the unexplained.
You were hired as a chief scientific adviser.
One tends to expect advice from one's advisers.
For one thing, Group Captain, I was not hired, I was drafted.
I have an important research programme going ahead at Cambridge.
- Steady on, Professor. - Steady on?
You drag me down from Cambridge,
you quote the Peacetime Emergency Powers Act at me,
and then you expect me to advise on something
outside the realm of human experience.
It was my birthday last week and I got a card
from my sister and her husband. And the card was... It was a Dalek
standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs,
saying, "Well, there go our plans for universal domination."
And it drives me crazy because, of course, in our story,
in the Dalek story we did, we answered all those jokes
about the Daleks not being able to go up stairs.
If you're supposed to be the superior race of the universe,
why don't you try climbing after us? Bye-bye.
Daleks going up the stairs, it was like the third thing.
It went Daleks, '63,
Daleks go up stairs.
That was like the first couple of weeks when I was sitting down
trying to work out what the hell I was going to do,
those were the things and they were going to go up in the cliff-hanger
at the end of Episode 1.
Because the cliff-hanger at the end of Episode 1 of the Dalek story
is always the big reveal of the Daleks.
Daleks!
I thought, "I'm going to have a Dalek turn up
"in the middle of Episode 1 when no one expects it to turn up."
And then at the end of Episode 1, instead of revealing that it's a Dalek,
which is quite a good reveal,
I'm going to raise the Dalek, they go up stairs!
You are the Doctor.
You are the enemy of the Daleks.
Even when they did the Dalek story in Russell's new series
people were still making the staircase jokes.
People latch on to something like that.
It's a bit frustrating 'cause you think, "Oh, we've laid that myth to rest."
But, no, you haven't, it just keeps coming back.
This cannot be correct.
Home planet Skaro about to vaporise.
At the very end of the story, the Doctor, he destroys Skaro,
which was quite a shock.
He'd just destroyed the Daleks' home planet.
So it's little wonder that the Daleks don't think much of the Doctor.
And it maybe even caused a time war all those years later. You never know.
You have tricked me.
No, Davros. You tricked yourself.
In the heat of the moment, in that, kind of,
Norse gods, kind of Ragnarok twilight of that battle,
it seemed absolutely the right thing to do.
But when you put it like that, sure,
it was the wrong thing to do, but it sure felt good.
What can I say? We loved blowing up their world.