Tales of Old Skaro

Terry Nation said he didn't like other Doctor Who writers using his creations because they couldn't get the Daleks' psychology right. He had a point. Certainly the Daleks have been increasingly badly handled in the 21st century version of the series. I think modern writers are all suckled on character arcs and rubber ducky motivational cues. Screenwriting doctrine teaches them to wrangle stories into those familiar shapes, but they aren't taught to stretch their imaginations out of the box so as to dream up really strange and original fantasies. Give them an alien menace and they want to portray it in soap opera terms -- were they abused? what's their character diamond? how can I make them more human? 

Ugh to all that. The reason the post-Nation Dalek stories kept featuring Davros (who was good for just one story) was that writers said they could give him a lot of dialogue, whereas the Daleks' own monotonous voices meant their dialogue had to be terse. Well, less is more and vice versa. To take an example from another show, as soon as you have a Borg queen spouting theatrically villainous dialogue like Ming the Merciless, the Borg are no longer the Other and you have to start from scratch to create that weirdness and menace. Or (attention, writers) you could just not cock them up to begin with.

Anyway, back to our would-be overlords from Skaro. For two years The Daleks was a strip on the back of the weekly UK comic TV Century 21. There's the first surprise. Only two years? I remember it as a major part of my childhood but the fact is (like the Silver Age heyday of Marvel Comics that same decade) it came and went in a blink. Now those 104 strips have been collected in book form, which you might be able to get here or here. Just not anywhere convenient like Amazon.

Quite apart from the stories, which are gems of compressed comics writing by Alan Fennell and David Whitaker, the background material about the strips is fascinating. As a child I never knew the artists’ names, but I remembered the first one (Richard Jennings) as being quite sloppy in the way he drew Daleks, which for speed he just did as round bullet-shapes. He also drew the strips in the first two Dalek annuals.

Ron Turner took over after a year. His work was more stylish, and he put more effort into getting the Daleks’ shape right, but I don’t think the stories were as good later on. And because his artwork was executed with such technical precision it was less engaging than Jennings's scrappier panels. There's a lesson there for comics artists today.

Why did Jennings leave the strip? I found the answer on the ever-reliable Bear Alley:

"[Jennings] spent a year drawing The Daleks for the back page of TV Century 21 in 1965 but drifted away from comics. 'For 18 months I worked as a long-distance lorry driver. Not very exciting but I was broke! I took my ancient jeep up to the Yorkshire Dales where I travelled around painting pub signs and portraits.'"

And that was when there were a lot of comics selling in the hundreds of thousands of copies every week. How much more impossible it is to make a living as an artist today. To think of a talented creative craftsman reduced to driving a lorry because it wasn't possible for him to actually get a decent wage for his work. I'd say it makes me weep but mainly it just makes me furious.

 
Still, those are old battles lost long ago. Back to the present day: the collection's editor, Marcus Hearn, theorizes that the end of the strip runs straight into the TV/movie storyline Daleks' Invasion Earth. But that’s set in 2150 AD, whereas the human race in the TV21 strip are clearly much more advanced, with FTL spaceships, which implies that it leads into the events of The Dalek Book and The Dalek World, which are set in the 25th century. (Since that’s the Daleks’ first contact with humanity, they must use their later discovery of time travel to conquer Earth in 2150, presumably to prevent their defeat at the end of The Dalek Book.)

Ain't broke

Well, I say it ain’t broke - but the voices, they’ve broken, haven’t they? Big and deep equals scary, obviously. We all know that, especially if we’re in marketing. And tall. Tall is threatening. Really, really tall. And big, like those Cybermen toys that sold so well last Christmas. When you think about it, why didn’t all the early Who team, people like Verity Lambert – why didn’t they get that? Big, tall, deep voiced. Like a Bad Dad. And easy to package so it fits on the shelves at Toys-R-Us. Golly, it’s a wonder the Daleks ever got going without ticking those boxes, isn't it?

That’s the committee view. It took one man to create the Daleks, and one man to design them, and after half a century it’s taken a committee to bugger them up. There are criticisms of the Daleks' brief off-screen appearance in the Paul McGann movie, but at least the producers of that understood what made the Daleks the best sci-fi villains of all time. Listen to them shrieking for the Master’s blood. They’re like angry children. Shrill, self-centered, hysterical. The Daleks are paranoid. They’re fanatics. You can’t reason with them. That’s why they’re scary.

I mean: why they were scary. Now that they’re big and gruff and pantomimey, you wait and see: the stories will all be about puncturing that pomposity. Don't worry children, there's no bully in the world that you can't see off if you just show him a bit of cheek. “Here’s a biscuit, I’m going to blow up your ship with it.” Rubbish - you can’t do any deal with a Dalek. You can’t say, “What do you mean?” and have it say, “I don’t understand.” They don’t engage with other life-forms that way (that’s their weakness, incidentally). They don’t bother with threats and boasts: “Pest control” – lazy writing, that; just prole-pleasing. To talk like that means you are engaging with the other person, that you have some inkling (and care) how he thinks. But it's when we come up against the wall through which connection cannot flow that, with a prickle of dread, we realize we are dealing with the Other.

The scariest thing about Daleks: they are untroubled by doubt. Put a floppy-haired schoolboy with a fake-blokey accent up against a Taliban theology student, see how much of a meaningful dialogue you’d get then. Turn the Taliban teenager up to eleven and give him a gun. Hate is all about fear. “Conquer and destroy”, geddit?

Look at what the Daleks were up to in The Invasion of Earth. Robotizing people, burning out their brains to enslave them. That’s creepy shit, man. Those little bastards were evil and relentless. Hate and fear were all they knew. Even the movie version, dumbed down and jokey, couldn’t help but deliver some real chills. Now we have “running to and fro" stories that are full of twaddle about DNA and empty threats and bloodlines and blowing up walking bombs and – yawn. It's like a Marvel crossover on fifteen double espressos. When did the Daleks cease to have a plan? When the writers ceased to have a clue.

It’s easy to knock the BBC. Well, it is if they make decisions on the basis of bone-headedness and greed. The new Dalek design was apparently imposed by order of BBC Marketing, who want more toys to sell. Allowing marketing to drive content is always a mistake (and, ironically, it's usually a commercial mistake as much as a creative one) but this is particularly iniquitous in Britain because of the TV Licence Fee, a form of poll tax levied on UK households if they want to watch any live television broadcasts, whether supplied by the BBC or another network. This makes the British viewing public the primary investor in the BBC itself; therefore to treat them as gullible punters who you can fleece of a tenner for a crap plastic toy is really unforgivable.

The one glimmer of intelligence in the whole sorry spectacle may be the message in a bottle Mark Gatiss planted, presumably after seeing exactly what the committee had cooked up to emerge from the magic cabinet – er, DNA replicator thingy: “We're talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.” Hmm, I know I’ve heard those words before...

Well here, for a generation who may never know, is an example of how single-minded the Daleks really were. “Every problem has a solution.” Yep, except the problem of the BBC committee.

SUSAN: Can't we stop them? Can't we do anything?
DOCTOR: Just a moment! I haven't told you how we came to this planet.
DALEK: It does not matter now.
DOCTOR: But…but it does! I have a ship capable of crossing the barriers of space and time. Surely this would be invaluable to you?
DALEK: A ship? What do you mean?
DOCTOR: A machine.
DALEK: I do not believe you.
DOCTOR: But I have!
SUSAN: It's true! We have!
DALEK: You are not capable of creating such a machine.
DOCTOR: You took a part of my ship away from one of my companions - the young man.
DALEK: What did it look like?
DOCTOR: A small rod with metal at either end. It belongs to my ship. A fluid link containing mercury. Examine it for yourselves. You will see it's part of a complicated machine.
DALEK: Yes, I have it here.
DOCTOR: Well, let me show you the ship, explain it to you, help you to build another.
DALEK: A bargain for your lives?
DOCTOR: Yes.
DALEK: Where is this machine?
DOCTOR: In the petrified forest outside the city.
DALEK: Good. When the neutron operation has been completed, we will find a way to travel outside the city limits.
DOCTOR: No!
FIRST DALEK: We will examine your machine.
DOCTOR: No! Not unless you stop what you're doing. Otherwise, I won't explain its secrets to you and its philosophy of movement.
DALEK: Now that we know of the machine, we can examine it for ourselves.
DOCTOR: But you can't operate it without me!
DALEK: Every problem has a solution.

Every problem has a solution!

Okay, so I know this is the Year of Wonders and not Skaro, but I had to put in a link to this feature on Down the Tubes about a Dalek TV series that never got made. (It was posted up around my birthday, when I was having my first beer since New Year's Eve - hence the long hangoverish delay in flagging this up.)

I actually did try (here's hubris) to get a Dalek TV movie going with the Sci-Fi Channel. This was before Russell T Davies's reimagining of Doctor Who, so not quite as long a shot as it sounds - the Daleks hadn't been on air for years. But Nation's agent explained that the BBC, although not actually having the rights, could stick their oar in to any production involving Daleks. Well, I've had some dealings with the BBC and I knew enough to drop the idea right there...

I'd heard years ago that Nation spent a while trying to get a Dalek series going in the USA, and that the stage play on which "Power of the Daleks" was based (see earlier post) had originally been written to pitch that. I assume the idea would have been to follow the history of the Daleks, along the lines taken by the Dalek comic strip in TV21.

I know at least one six-year-old who would have given every penny of his pocket money from then till the present day to see that ;)