Doctor Who – The Power of the Daleks

dwpowersmFifty three years past its first broadcast, the long history of Doctor Who is ingrained in popular culture, the TARDIS, the Daleks, regeneration, Time Lords, sonic screwdrivers, Jelly Babies and a cornucopia of other memories and associations, yet the longest running science fiction show in the world has lived as dangerously behind the scenes as in the stories themselves, with BBC seniors indifferent from the outset, the show suspended for eighteen months in the mid eighties and off the air as a regular fixture entirely between 1989 and 2005.

Yet one of the greatest challenges to the show was almost entirely internal, though precipitated by external circumstance, as during the production of the third series it became apparent to the then recently appointed producer Innes Lloyd and script editor Gerry Davis, who had himself joined the show only weeks before Lloyd, that the deteriorating health of their leading man was jeopardising the future of the show.

christmas-tardisOn an ensemble show with a large featured cast, rotation out of a single actor would not have presented a problem, but built around the character of the Doctor and with William Hartnell the only remaining member of the four principals who had launched the show in November 1963, an alternative approach was needed, and in the final moments of The Tenth Planet the Doctor retreated to the TARDIS where he collapsed, weakened by the draining effect of Mondas, home planet of the Cybermen.

When the next episode was broadcast, on Saturday 5th November 1966, a new era of Doctor Who had begun, with Polly and Ben racing into the TARDIS to find a stranger lying by the control console, eccentric, playful, distracted and distinctly unhelpful, indifferent to the concern of his companions, a game played with the audience as much as with companions Ben and Polly. Can this be the Doctor?

dwpower1Ben dismisses it as impossible, but Polly is more sanguine: “Not so long ago we’d have been saying that about a lot of things.” Indeed, since joining the Doctor in the summer of 1966 they had fought WOTAN and its War Machines in contemporary London, met smugglers in seventeenth century Cornwall and fended off an Antarctic invasion in the distant year of 1986, yet one of the greatest challenges overcome by The Power of the Daleks is that it has been seen again at all.

With the master tapes of all six episodes erased in the late sixties and the 16mm film copies destroyed in the seventies only a handful of clips existed in addition to archival “telesnaps” taken during original broadcast and recordings of the soundtracks which together form the basis for a new animation, the first time a classic “lost” Doctor Who serial has been recreated in its entirety as opposed to missing episodes having been reconstructed to fill the gaps, as was the case with The Reign of Terror, The Tenth Planet, The Moonbase and The Ice Warriors.

dwpower2Based on the work of original director Christopher Barry and the first time the BBC have used an in-house team rather than an external studio, certainly animation director Charles Norton and his team have beautifully rendered every detail of the TARDIS interior and the other background environments of the struggling human colony on the planet Vulcan, but while the mechanical facets of the Dalek housings lend themselves to simplified animated forms the characters are crude caricatures.

As the Doctor and Polly, the representations of Patrick Troughton and Anneke Wills are adequate, though the normally handsome Michael Craze is unflatteringly shortchanged as Ben, and strictly functional rather than flowing the motion of all is as stilted as the story which is overstretched at six episodes despite the presence of a new Doctor, the internal struggles of the rival factions of the colony and the menace from Skaro.

dwpower3Written by the show’s original script editor David Whitaker as Dalek creator Terry Nation who had contributed all of the earlier stories to feature them (The Daleks, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Chase, The Daleks’ Master Plan) was unavailable, with contributions by Dennis Spooner, another experienced Doctor Who writer, the Daleks had been a perennial ratings winner so their inclusion was intended to guarantee an attentive audience to launch Patrick Troughton, yet their presence is minimal.

Instead, with Polly and in particular Ben having little more faith in his identity than Governer Hensell (Peter Bathurst), head of security Bragen (Bernard Archard) and lead scientists Lesterson and Janley (Robert James and Pamela Ann Davy) have in his authority, the Doctor serves in the role of Cassandra, warning of doom but unheeded by those around him due to a conspicuous lack of extermination over four of the six episodes.

dwpower4There are moments of interest, particularly those which have informed later stories, the Doctor practicing tongue twisters as he grows accustomed to his new body, his statement that one Dalek would be enough to wipe out the colony reflected by Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor in the 2005 episode Dalek and the initially subservient role of the first Dalek reanimated by Lesterson heavily influencing Bracewell’s “Ironside” in 2010’s Victory of the Daleks with its cry of “WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA?”

The animation for the most part recreating as faithfully as possible the episodes as originally staged in the confines of the studio, it is a frustratingly static experience, characters walking into rooms and talking but with little progress and less urgency despite the double crosses and treachery, the “kidnapping” of first Polly then Ben painfully contrived to give the performers a holiday while the Doctor is vague and ineffective, never driving the story despite it being his crucial first adventure.

dwpower7Where changes have been made is in sidestepping some of the limitations of the BBC budget, with all the digital Daleks created to the same standard; originally, the production line was created in miniature and populated by off-the-shelf toys, noticeably different in specification from the full scale props, and the army massed later was composed of only four actual Daleks boosted by a greater number of photographic standees in the rear ranks.

What is also effective is the lighting, the Doctor holding a lamp in the darkened capsule where the deactivated Daleks are first found beneath cobwebs, the changing patterns on the surface of the Daleks as they rotate, and there are artistic touches, a camera pullback from the exterior through a window, a Dalek eye lens back to that window, but the dramatic compromises inherited from the original story cannot be avoided.

dwpower5Prolonging the contact between the humans and the normally hostile Daleks to six episodes can only be done by minimising their threat and so undermining any sense of ongoing danger, and the title The Power of the Daleks promises far more than it delivers with less focus on the overwhelming might of the master species and more on Lesterson’s efforts to awaken them with electrical charge then their own arrangements to maintain an independent power source to keep them operative.

As the story progresses Janley becomes more complicated while Lesterson’s wailing hysterics do him no favours, but it is when Daleks themselves take centre stage it finally becomes interesting, stating they will teach humans “the law of the Daleks,” a phrase begging to become the title of a future story, as yet unwritten, and questioning the murderous rivalry between the colonists, a thought inconceivable to the Daleks at that time, their own civil war being many years in the future.

dwpower6Supporting the main feature is a brief and rather flat documentary with contributions from Anneke Wills, recalling the apprehension among the team as Patrick Troughton took over as the Doctor, wondering whether the show would survive the transition, director Christopher Barry who had worked with Troughton before and considered him “a very accomplished actor,” and designer Derek Dodds, talking of his influences and desire to recreate Forbidden Planet on the modest budget available.

With Doctor Who taking a break in 2016 other than the forthcoming Christmas special The Return of Doctor Mysterio and BBC Enterprises having previously described the show as “a dead line,” the unexpected release of The Power of the Daleks is welcome if not altogether satisfying and somewhat lessens the ongoing hurt that the original material could so cavalierly have been destroyed. Whether it will be sufficiently successful to encourage the reconstruction of other stories from the Hartnell and Troughton eras in the absence of any further recovered episodes, only time will tell.

The Power of the Daleks is available on DVD now

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