Doctor Who - Documentary s02e04 Episode Script
Future Memories
I think the character of Jenny was tough on the surface.
She had made herself be tough because of what had happened to her and to her family, but underneath she was still very hurt and vulnerable and upset.
She felt she had to be tough in order to get something done and fight the Daleks and get her own back for what they'd done to her.
(BERNARD KAY) It's been suggested to me that Tyler was an action hero, but I don't think that's true.
I think he was a very ordinary man who was caught up in some quite extraordinary situations and did what he had to do.
He was a pragmatist.
It's very difficult from Thinking about it Good and bad don't come into it.
He was an everyman, in a way, caught up in these terrifying situations.
For instance, he knifed to death one of the robot humans, human robots, and shot another one at quite close range, but he looked after people.
He looked after them in a purely practical way.
It had to be done so he did it.
He doesn't show affection or hatred.
I think it's implied that he's lost his family, because there's no one around him in the meeting rooms.
He's not like Dortmun.
He doesn't want to be a leader, but he wants to survive.
(PETER FRASER) I was the love interest in the programme, but an awful lot of young girls would be very unhappy about the fact that I kept the Doctor's granddaughter on Earth, because they looked forward to identifying with her throughout the series.
Wells I think ''Mr Wells'' he was probably called at the time.
I don't remember it all that well.
He was a West Country farmer who'd been captured by the Daleks.
(WEST COUNTRY ACCENT) I played him with a West Country accent like that, and he was a fairly fly sort of a character.
One didn't do a Stanislavsky rundown or analysis of a character like that! You just got on and did it! I think possibly I got the job because I had a lot of enthusiasm for the idea of playing a character in that situation, which was I don't know how you'd put it.
They were under terrific pressure from the Daleks.
I knew the director, Richard Martin.
I was in repertory with him in Cleethorpes, I think.
I got this contract for six weeks and thought, ''He must have thought I was a really good actor!'' So I turned up for the filming on the Sunday, for which we got £25, for one day's filming, and I said, ''Richard, it's very kind of you to give me a contract.
''I don't know what a Dalek is.
'' And he said, ''We've chosen you because you're so small, ''we thought you could get into one of these.
'' And he pointed to a Dalek, and one was a bit taken aback! I'd had a few walk-ons - not for the BBC, for other companies - and then I said, ''I'm not doing this anymore.
''It's got to be a speaking part or nothing.
'' And so I was offered this Doctor Who - one episode.
During the course of the week, I saw the scripts for the next two episodes, and my character was not in it, so I said to the director, ''What's happened to the farmer, Mr Wells?'' He said, ''Well, I do need someone to lead the revolt against the Daleks.
''Are you busy for the next two weeks?'' I said, ''I'm not sure No, I'm actually free!'' And so I talked myself into doing three episodes.
As far as what it was like, this was my first television acting role, so I just did it as best I could, took the money and ran! Richard Martin - or Dickie Martin, we called him - I knew him at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry.
He had been an actor there, and he gradually moved over to directing during his time there, and he remembered me and very kindly asked me to be in it.
My own approach to a part is just to read it and read it and read it.
I'm very fortunate with my memory, so by the time I've done that for a few days, it's all in there.
In the bath, on the loo, whatever.
Read it, read it, read it, and do it aloud and drive your wife crazy, but it goes in.
When you do that, to me, something happens in your mind and ideas come out.
There's just one shot as Tyler when there's been some action and he's in an underground room with Dortmun and the rest, and they're discussing what to do and everyone's being very frantic.
I'm speaking now because it's objective.
I've just seen the tape.
Tyler's just leaning against a wall, listening.
Quite transparent.
Listening, but conserving energy.
I don't know where that came from, because everybody else is rushing round saying, ''We must do this or that.
'' I'm sure Richard Martin said, ''How do you feel about this?'' And I said, ''I just want to'' When in doubt, do nothing! I found out afterwards that Jenny had been considered as a replacement for Carole Ann Ford as Susan, but they took time to decide.
I do remember that when Dickie Martin phoned me about it, he said, ''I can't actually offer it to you yet'' He was checking whether I'd be interested and whether I'd be able to do it.
''.
.
because they haven't quite decided how they want it done.
''Do they want a child, an early teenager, or do they want somebody grown up?'' I had to wait, so I suppose that's what they were deciding then.
Richard, as a director, he was lovely.
When you get directors who have been actors, they go one of two ways.
They either resent the fact they've not made it as an actor, and they become very hard on actors, or they do what Richard did, which was remember what it was like to be an actor, and treat actors that way, and that's what he did.
He had one fault - he was too nice.
I met Jackie - again, I called her ''Jackie'' - on that show.
She was terrifically kind and friendly, and I liked her very much, and we got on very well.
She was very helpful because she had been in the series from the beginning.
She knew how it all ran and what the things were that you looked out for.
She was very generous in helping me and being friendly, and saying, ''If I was you'' kind of thing.
It wasn't until a few years later that she and her husband moved into a house opposite to us, and from then on, we became very great friends right up until the time of her death.
She died ten years ago next month, which is unbelievable to me.
We had daughters who were literally a few days apart from each other in age, they went to the same schools, we shared the car run.
We used to go to suppers with each other.
We did the OU together.
We were at the Open University.
We started that when our children grew up.
She said, ''What am I going to do ''now John's going away as well?'' That was her son.
I said I'd been thinking of doing the Open University, and she said, ''Right!'', and being Jackie, we were signed up in three days! She had this wonderful sort of bossy quality.
She was really great.
I remember her once saying to me, ''Well, when you've found out the best way to do things, ''it does seem a shame not to tell everybody else!'' I really loved her, and I still miss her very much.
She was a great girl.
Jacqueline Hill was just so beautiful and so charming, always in good humour.
My daughter and her partner, who were watching an old episode, said, ''God! She is so beautiful!'' And she was, she was just lovely.
And Carole Ann Ford was delightful.
I'd worked with her before in ''Expresso Bongo''.
She'd been my partner in that.
She's a very good actress.
And of course, William Hartnell.
Lots of good actors there.
And William Russell, of course.
Lovely actor.
We had a happy time really.
(BERNARD KAY) Bill Hartnell was I think he was a very fine actor and he'd done some wonderful work in things like ''Carry On Sergeant'', but he was quite quirky about his rights.
We rehearsed in a room which was London Transport Training Centre, and this room, you could have got a thousand people in there.
There were hundreds of identical chairs, and he had his name on the back of one of these chairs.
Jackie warned me very early on, ''Don't sit in his chair because he will not like it.
'' I noticed that even when he wasn't there, he hadn't been called in to rehearsal, nobody sat in that chair! I went to the props department - I was feeling very wicked - and got them to make one for each of the cast, and he was furious.
He really was furious.
He somehow felt his position was being undermined because we had our names on our chairs.
(PETER FRASER) The good thing about working with William Hartnell was he was always the character of the Doctor.
Off screen, he was the character of the Doctor.
So It was good.
It helps the actorme, it helps you to react and relate to him in the correct manner for the programme, and that's very important.
I was commuting between London and Madrid.
I was doing Doctor Who and ''Doctor Zhivago'', which was my first proper film.
He said, ''What's all this? ''Coming in from Heathrow with all your luggage? What are you doing?'' I said, ''I've got a nice little part on 'Doctor Zhivago''', and he said, ''Oh! They offered me a wonderful part on 'Zhivago' ''and I couldn't do it because of this!'' It was sweet, but there was also something a little bit bitter there.
I quite frankly found him a bit frightening and a bit grumpy, and I just kept clear of him, to be honest with you! I liked Bill Hartnell's portrayal of the character.
It was wonderfully detailed and eccentric and true.
And very true.
And I got on well with him.
We were driving after rehearsal - I think we were going to a costumer's.
We went round Berkeley Square.
We must have been going to Maurice Angel, the costumers.
We were driving through the road between Berkeley Square and Bond Street, and it happened to be where Hartnell was, who was the Royal family tailor or designer.
As we passed, Bill said, ''See that? ''That's my cousin up there.
The tailor, yes.
'' William Hartnell was a perfectionist, so if at some time he didn't seem in the best of humours, it was because he was worrying about a problem.
And he was much older than the rest of us, and he had those lines to get under his belt, so he was a very busy man.
I found him most charming.
He used to get betting tips from the crew and they all said, ''No, Bill, I don't want to give you a tip because'' ''Come on! You must know people.
'' And if the horse didn't win, he went for them.
He really went a blinder for them.
I always got on very well with Bill.
Not everybody did.
He could be a bristly old character.
(LAUGHS) I got on well with him and I managed to handle him all right, apart from one occasion when he came to dinner one evening, and my wife had gone to a lot of trouble to lay on a very good dinner, and he arrived something like two hours late.
We'd given up all hope.
The dinner was burnt to a cinder and everything.
Eventually, there was a knock-knock at the door, and there was Bill, and he greeted us by saying, ''Why can't you put a proper bloody number on your door?!'' He'd been driving round for two hours apparently! So we sat down at this mess of food that was left, then it went on till four o'clock in the morning.
We couldn't get rid of him then! He was a funny old boy.
He got me drinking scotch.
That's one of the happiest memories I have of him.
I drank gin till I met Bill.
He said scotch was better for me, so I started drinking scotch.
I can't remember which way round it was, but we went to Trafalgar Square.
I think that was first.
I was amazed that there were so many people knocking about, but I think they were young people who'd stayed up in town overnight, and were wandering about Trafalgar Square.
They were a bit bemused by us.
They weren't waiting for us to arrive.
Then we went down to Westminster Bridge and had to push Alan Judd across the bridge in a wheelchair.
We had to run as though the Daleks were pursuing us.
That wheelchair was heavy, and with Alan Judd in it as well.
We really had to push hard.
It was freezing.
It was coming up to Christmas.
We'd been hanging around for a long time.
I think we all felt the need to relieve ourselves, and there was nobody round about.
There certainly weren't any loos in Trafalgar Square, and I hit on the idea of using a grating.
And it was such a lovely picture, seeing a little queue of Daleks waiting to use the grating in Trafalgar Square! Nobody said anything and it worked! That's the main thing, it worked! The other thing I remember, which was a location shot, was, um I can't remember exactly where it was, but it was when I had to jump on the dust cart, which was moving and being driven by Jackie.
It was very old.
I think it must have been from the thirties, because it was in the sixties that we did these episodes.
It was very heavy for her to drive, and she said, ''You do realise I can't absolutely slow down? ''Do you think you'll be able to jump on?'' And I said, ''Yes, I think I will.
'' So I had to sort of leap on and she was driving away.
She was splendid, the way she drove this heavy old dust cart, and I leapt on and it all went well.
I rather enjoyed it.
It was great fun.
On the first day of being a Dalek, it was a bit worrying, because we had the lovely Jacqueline Hill and Ann Davies driving at us in this lorry, full tilt! Three Daleks, I think, were across the road, and the lorry's getting nearer and nearer, and just before she hit us, it was stopped, and I think they put an old Dalek in or something, and then the lorry went back, came in again and crashed into the Daleks.
It went ching! That was quite exciting.
I'm glad I wasn't in it.
My hair was really dark and I had it blonded for the production.
I think they didn't want to have two dark-haired youngish women in it, and Carole Ann Ford's hair was dark.
When we did the exterior location scenes, I hadn't at that point had my hair altered in colour, so that had to be disguised because we had decided on it, but I hadn't had it done.
I had to wear this terrible balaclava-cum-pixie hat to hide my hair, and that was the reason I had it on! Pushing the wheelchair may have been quite tough, but that was nothing to Robert Jewell, who was one of the Daleks.
I don't know whether people know that there were actors inside them, and that they had to push something like a bicycle inside the Dalek.
He had to come up out of the Thames.
That must have been really tough.
They did it in three shots.
They had a full Dalek under the water with a wire attached to the front, and they pulled it up the ramp till it got to a certain height.
The camera stopped, the machine stopped, they lifted the top off carefully so nothing was disturbed, then they lifted me into the Dalek and put the top back on again.
Then they pulled it up with the wire again till it got very low, and I was going like that with the eye, and then they stopped again because it was close to the pulling machine with the wire on it.
They had to move it that out of the way.
Everything was stopped again.
The camera was left there, the machine was left there, they disconnected everything, and off we went again.
Originally, the BBC said, ''They're not going to be visible, whoever operates the Daleks, ''so we'll just get whoever happens to be handy in the studio crew, ''and say, 'For this recording, you've got to sit inside a Dalek.
'''You just do this on cue.
You've got to go from there to there.
' ''There's no point in employing actors for this, ''when we have to pay extra money and the crew's there anyhow.
'' And they discovered, to their total amazement, that when it comes to timing and doing things precisely on cue, you need the professionals.
A thing that Jackie told me which was along the same lines, was that she and Carole Ann Ford were discussing their personal lives in a corner of the rehearsal room, and they were standing near a Dalek.
They thought it was just a Dalek machine with no one in it, and they were having this chat, very personal stuff.
They walked away and the scene started and this machine rolled towards them.
Somebody had been sitting in there, listening to their conversation! We couldn't get out unless someone came and took the top off for us.
If it was tea-time or lunchtime or whatever, everyone just zoomed, they'd gone, and we'd be knocking saying, ''Excuse me! Can someone let us out, please?'' (NICHOLAS SMITH) We'd go off for a coffee or go and chat and they would stay in their machines.
It looked like an empty studio, then someone would suddenly say, ''Have you got the time on you?'' and you were being addressed by a Dalek! Or you'd see cigarette smoke floating out of the top! That very first day, when I was introduced to this Dalek machine, there were one or two things you had to sort out.
For a start, you could sit down in the Dalek, and you moved around with a bicycle chain and pedals.
That's how you moved.
You had a gear stick up here to guide which way the wheels went.
You had to be put into these things.
They were very heavy.
It was like moulded plywood.
It was probably fibreglass or something.
So somebody had to put the top on.
Then you put in your various electrics.
You had the eye up here which was shifted manually.
You had a gun with sparks on down here.
There were a couple of lights on the side.
And that was it.
You could see It was quite tunnel vision.
You couldn't see very well, and you couldn't hear instructions on the floor very well.
It wasn't very comfortable.
You really were crunched up inside, and I'm not very big! Daleks were extremely heavy to manoeuvre, as I've said, and there were ramps that we had to go up from time to time.
We would try to go up and fail, and there would be a small body the other side pushing, very carefully keeping out of camera, making sure that we could get up all right.
One of the oddest things about the three episodes that I was in was a creature called the Slyther, which was an actor - not, I remember, a particularly tall actor - dressed in a rubber suit with what looked like leaves sticking out all over him.
He had to walk around slowly, growling.
He was lovely and rubbery, lots of tentacles, and really quite scary for children.
He was like something out of the sea, but the best part about him was that he throbbed.
So you would see him round corners, about to pounce on someone, and generally upsetting people, and the children went for it, because I got lots of Christmas cards that year, ''Dear Mr Slyther, have a nice Christmas, love from Rose, Fred and the kids.
'' They loved all that nastiness.
It had absolutely no connection whatever with the plot.
Whether it was a pet of the Daleks, or whether it had dropped in from another planet, we never discovered.
So this thing walked around, growling, and, as far as I know, it didn't do any harm.
I've a vague feeling it may have killed Paddy O'Connell's character in the end, but whether it ate him or not, I'm not sure! The first time the Slyther went out on screen, it was a Saturday night, and I had the ''Daily Mail'' on the phone to me straight away.
Presumably, it was a slow news week, but they wanted to know all about the Slyther.
Well, I didn't know what to tell them.
I didn't have any photographs, he didn't have any lines and it wasn't a very big part, so they came round to the house and tried to get a story.
He was Australian, of course.
(AUSTRALIAN ACCENT) ''So, Nicholas, you played the Slyther?'' I said, ''That's right.
'' He said, ''What does it look like?'' So I said, ''I'll draw it for you.
'' So I drew this terrible picture of this sack with tentacles, and tried to make it look as scary as possible.
He said, ''Oh, right, yes, I'll buy that.
''Now, how can we make this a story connected to you? ''Got any children?'' I said, ''No, not so far.
'' ''Got any animals?'' ''No.
'' He was looking round the walls and saw various pictures and said, ''I see you're into art.
'' I said, ''Well, not really'', but we went out into the garden and took pictures of me being jolly and young, and pictures of me with a cigarette with smoke going up looking all sinister.
''Nick Evans, who plays the Slyther.
'' I was very pleased to get all the attention, but very surprised.
The Slyther didn't appear again after that, because that nasty William Russell killed it, if you remember, with a rock.
Shame, shame! When you rehearse, you have no problems from the point of view of the action.
You rehearse for four days.
When you go into the studio and the set's built, then there are complications, because where you thought the camera could move, it can't.
It's too big.
Or two cameras are virtually filming in the same direction, so one of them's redundant.
You must use cameras to get the maximum out of them, which makes it difficult for the director.
It's very difficult in the studio.
There was such a quick turnaround, you see? If you were filming, you filmed on the Sunday, £25! Then you'd start your next script on the Monday, and on the Thursday you would have a run-through for your technicians, and Verity Lambert would come and see what had been done, all the problems, all the camera angles, whether the scenery was right for what was needed for the storyline, and then you would actually record it on the Friday.
When we rehearse, we rehearse with tapes on the floor.
They represent the doors, the walls, the sewer.
That's in the rehearsals room.
Then when you come into the studio, everything is there, but not everything is - the water isn't there until the actual recording.
They added the water and I stepped in and destroyed a pair of good shoes! That's the mean Scotsman in me that remembers that! There was one wonderful day when about ten Daleks had to stream out of a machine, and they all caught the sides of the Adjustments had to be made very hurriedly.
I don't think they realised they were quite so broad or so heavy.
They were extremely heavy.
They're extremely heavy to push along.
Later on, they got rid of the pedals and chain, and you moved it around with your feet.
It was lighter and you were more mobile.
One thing about Doctor Who in those days - it changed a lot later on with different Doctors coming in - was that it was done very much on the cheap.
I think probably, ''It's only for kids so it doesn't really matter.
''Don't need to spend any money on it.
'' We rehearsed for four or five days, and had one day in the studio to do this very complicated, technical stuff.
There was one sequence in which the three heroes, the three younger people, I couldn't remember exactly who, were supposed to be fastened to a metallic wall, with these very futuristic magnets.
And somebody had made a sort of three-quarters thing like this, such as Daleks might have produced, and they fitted round your neck with magnets in and were stuck to a wall.
And the props were beautifully made.
The BBC prop department, as I know from ''Are You Being Served?'', were absolutely brilliant and they could make anything.
They'd made these and then someone said, ''We need some magnets to put in them.
'' They went to Woolworth's and got these little magnets.
You put them on the wall and they fell off, so these characters who were supposed to be magnetised to the wall, had to hold these things in place, otherwise they'd have dropped off! I was in Wardrobe in the studios one day, and the monitors were going, the screens with all the storyline on, and we could see what was happening.
I think I was being changed into the Slyther outfit.
On the screen, we could see the Robomen.
They'd turned against the Daleks, and they were fighting like fury and getting really cross with them.
There's a great close-up of several Robomen throwing a Dalek in the air, up and catching it, and up and catching it again.
And one rather camp dresser gentleman said to another, ''Oh, dear.
What's going on there?'' And the other one said, ''I don't know.
Perhaps it's its birthday.
'' (PETER FRASER) The scene with the fish with Carole Ann Ford.
I remember that, and it's a strange thing, I don't remember it happily because I was never really happy about doing it.
I thought it was a bit twee, what you would expect in that situation, and I try never to give anybody what they want in that situation, the audience, I mean, but the director wanted it that way.
What I felt about it was the scene from the outset, of how I came into the scene with the fish, the whole scene was leaning towards the end which would be It would end up in a kiss or a kiss and a cuddle or something like that.
I was very pleased to have a contract for six weeks, but I was surprised when I found I was being a Dalek operator.
Never mind, I just got on with it, but professionally, it wasn't going to do me a great deal of good.
This isn't being snobby.
You really try and do a better job each time.
Go up a notch if you can.
Being a Dalek operator, one was on a par with the extras.
Fair enough, good people that they are.
I thought, ''What I'll do is have my name taken off the credits'', and then no one will know that it's me in the machine.
I think they were off three of the credits and they were on three of the credits.
That's why people have got confused about whether I was in them or not.
I did a great deal more than people know about.
I just did it, was pleased to do it, took the money I think I got 40 guineas per programme.
A guinea, folks, was a pound with a shilling added on.
The BBC paid in guineas in those days! I don't know why! Really, that was the end of it.
I thought no more about it.
And for some 20 or 30 years, the fact that I'd been in Doctor Who was just a dim memory.
Over the last ten years, people have asked for my autograph because I was in Doctor Who! They know far more about it than I do! After doing that programme The strange thing was, everybody in the business knew I'd been in it, but it didn't mean that people gave me a job because it was successful.
But everybody knew about me having been in it - I mean casting directors and other directors.
That doesn't mean to say that they didn't know I'd done the plays at the Royal Court theatre, or other successful TV shows, but everybody knew about it.
When I do pantomime, I have Dalek fans turning up with pictures of Daleks, pictures of me, wanting a photograph taken with me.
It's extraordinary.
Perfectly nice people in their 30s, but really keen on Daleks.
More people stopped me in the street after that, than Two years earlier, I'd done ''Deadline Midnight'' for six months.
This had six episodes, yet more people stopped me in the street to talk about the programme.
If I'm at a party and I'm not getting any attention but I'd like some, I'll just drop into the conversation that I used to be a Dalek, and suddenly you've got people's interest! (ANN DAVIES) I think Daleks had this combination of being quite Perhaps frightening at the time.
Young children hid behind the sofa now and again.
But they had an almost comedy edge to them, and there were a lot of children who used to get the sink plunger out, and pretend to be a Dalek, and go around going, ''Exterminate!'' to each other.
So there was that in those days.
People have talked to me, grown up, and children at that time, and there's no question they were absolutely fascinated by them.
But the appeal? The unknown, I suppose.
They didn't know what was going to happen next, and it wasn't a human being you were dealing with, it was something from another planet.
You didn't know how it was going to react or behave.
Ooh! Exciting! The voice spoken by a wonderful actor called Peter Hawkins at the time with that electronic distortion It was probably the first time it had ever been done.
The tone of voice was the thing which was very large, was a very large part of the popularity of the Daleks, and the fact that the Daleks were frightening.
A machine that spoke, and the fact that they shot rays and blanked people out, and they had a sink plunger attached to them which made me laugh, but I think the voice was a very large part of it.
I think it's the battle between good and evil, isn't it? It's the battle between the outsider and the people in power, or against the invader.
And that's a story that goes on for always, doesn't it? Personally, I found them .
.
boring! But if you look at them in terms of the programme, they were very interesting, because I don't think anything had ever been done like that before.
People like Dick I can't remember the initials of the author's name.
A great American writer.
He was writing science fiction stuff of that type, and people were in love with it, and this was the manifestation of it.
''I am a Dalek! Exterminate!'' The kids loved them! Well, you talk about the Daleks, but they were rubbish, weren't they, actually? I mean, look at them.
They had these funny steel domes that swivelled.
They had flat bottoms, and sometimes you saw the bottom if one got turned over in action.
They had these sink plungers sticking out the front, and another thing which sent the rays out, but they couldn't go anywhere.
I was very amused by the fact the Daleks could only move on level ground.
Here are these terrifying machines, and all you had to do was go upstairs and they couldn't get near you! There was one shot somewhere, I think it was the Albert Memorial.
They trundle along, stop at the flight of steps, and then you have to cut away because they can't go down the steps.
There's no way they can go down steps or climb a hill with rocks on it.
In fact, towards the end of ''Daleks' Invasion of Earth'', when everyone rebels, they just pick them up and throw them around like old dolls.
So they were rubbish, but they were wonderful rubbish.
Every now and then, the Daleks would make a Nazi salute, because they wanted to equate Daleks with Nazis taking over the world, so I think we did that on the Albert Memorial at one point.
Sort of stating their claim.
Good stuff.
Very effective.
Quite dramatic! The fact that the Daleks used Nazi phraseology like ''the final solution'', and ''exterminate'' and words like that, must have added an extra dimension to the story, a shadow across it.
It would remind people of things that had happened not long before, or that they'd been frightened would happen not that long before.
It's always marvellous in this business When you do a job, you see the script or you're cast, and you do it to the very best of your ability, and often you don't know that down the years they're going to become a cult or a classic.
That's what a classic is.
After a certain number of years, it achieves a popularity and a notoriety.
People just love it.
Doctor Who was successful, but the Daleks There'd been an episode of the Daleks before and that made it very successful.
Everybody knew that.
I mean that everybody involved in the production knew that, but when it was shown, everybody was stunned by the viewing figures.
They were fantastic.
Something like 11 or 12 million viewers for a Saturday night, for a half hour, which most of us thought was a children's programme! We were all stunned, at least I was stunned! You could have a whole family of kids and adults watching Doctor Who.
They'd go, ''Ooh! What's going to happen to our hero?'' But it wasn't really frightening.
There was none of this awful gut fear that you get in some films.
It was, in the best sense of the word, family entertainment.
There's the quality of magic, and it's a sort of ''Anything can happen!'' Anything can happen.
You can go inside the Tardis and be whisked away to another world.
It's a form of escape as well, in the way that films like the ''Harry Potter'' films are a form of escape.
I think that's always very popular, especially if it's well done! They weren't tied down to one situation.
They could go extra galactical, in the Earth, into history, into the future.
And it's the format.
The basic format never changed.
There was a crisis and people were going to get wiped out, or the Earth was going to blow up, and Doctor Who would sort it all out, but it was done in so many different ways, and that's what all adventure is - at the eleventh hour, all will be well! I really loved it, and I remember it much more than I remember other television things that I did round about that time.
It was just great fun.
The machines are fun, and I liked the people I was working with.
I knew Bernard Kay and Peter Fraser, and Jackie became quickly a friend, so I have very happy memories of it.
With regard to the programme itself, when I saw it after 39 years, it was made in 1964, I was surprised by how good it was.
I mean, that's looking back all these years.
Things have moved forward so quickly now.
Everything is ''Cut, cut, cut, cut!'' The framing is excellent.
Some of the performances are reasonable, some are not so good, but it had something, it had a quality.
It must have had something or it wouldn't have been a damn success! If it was made today, it would never go out.
Well, nobody would make it today, not like that .
.
simply because people expect more now in technical terms.
So the only way I hear that there's a lot of interest in it now, but it's nostalgic interest.
I think it's wonderful! I think it's really amazing and wonderful.
And I do get letters even now - I think a lot of people who were in Doctor Who do - from people asking for photos and signatures, and little stories about it.
There's a great interest in it.
It's really amazing.
My own view about the popularity of Doctor Who as a series or as a series of series, is the sort of Merlin character of the Doctor himself.
That he is the old, wise, grandfather figure.
As I say, he is Merlin.
He's the sorcerer, and he's one thousand years old or more.
Watching the story now It is such a long time ago, I've practically forgotten it all, so it's completely new and jolly interesting.
I'm part of television history, aren't I? If Doctor Who came back and I had the slightest chance I would absolutely jump at it.
I would certainly grow a full white beard again.
I've probably got one hair left.
I'd let that grow a bit longer, and I'd ask the make-up people to age me up.
I'm 68 now, but he's a lot older than that, and ought to look it, and if you think Bill Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, they were all older actors and I'm sure that's what ought to be done.
So put in a plug, Nicholas Smith as Doctor Who!
She had made herself be tough because of what had happened to her and to her family, but underneath she was still very hurt and vulnerable and upset.
She felt she had to be tough in order to get something done and fight the Daleks and get her own back for what they'd done to her.
(BERNARD KAY) It's been suggested to me that Tyler was an action hero, but I don't think that's true.
I think he was a very ordinary man who was caught up in some quite extraordinary situations and did what he had to do.
He was a pragmatist.
It's very difficult from Thinking about it Good and bad don't come into it.
He was an everyman, in a way, caught up in these terrifying situations.
For instance, he knifed to death one of the robot humans, human robots, and shot another one at quite close range, but he looked after people.
He looked after them in a purely practical way.
It had to be done so he did it.
He doesn't show affection or hatred.
I think it's implied that he's lost his family, because there's no one around him in the meeting rooms.
He's not like Dortmun.
He doesn't want to be a leader, but he wants to survive.
(PETER FRASER) I was the love interest in the programme, but an awful lot of young girls would be very unhappy about the fact that I kept the Doctor's granddaughter on Earth, because they looked forward to identifying with her throughout the series.
Wells I think ''Mr Wells'' he was probably called at the time.
I don't remember it all that well.
He was a West Country farmer who'd been captured by the Daleks.
(WEST COUNTRY ACCENT) I played him with a West Country accent like that, and he was a fairly fly sort of a character.
One didn't do a Stanislavsky rundown or analysis of a character like that! You just got on and did it! I think possibly I got the job because I had a lot of enthusiasm for the idea of playing a character in that situation, which was I don't know how you'd put it.
They were under terrific pressure from the Daleks.
I knew the director, Richard Martin.
I was in repertory with him in Cleethorpes, I think.
I got this contract for six weeks and thought, ''He must have thought I was a really good actor!'' So I turned up for the filming on the Sunday, for which we got £25, for one day's filming, and I said, ''Richard, it's very kind of you to give me a contract.
''I don't know what a Dalek is.
'' And he said, ''We've chosen you because you're so small, ''we thought you could get into one of these.
'' And he pointed to a Dalek, and one was a bit taken aback! I'd had a few walk-ons - not for the BBC, for other companies - and then I said, ''I'm not doing this anymore.
''It's got to be a speaking part or nothing.
'' And so I was offered this Doctor Who - one episode.
During the course of the week, I saw the scripts for the next two episodes, and my character was not in it, so I said to the director, ''What's happened to the farmer, Mr Wells?'' He said, ''Well, I do need someone to lead the revolt against the Daleks.
''Are you busy for the next two weeks?'' I said, ''I'm not sure No, I'm actually free!'' And so I talked myself into doing three episodes.
As far as what it was like, this was my first television acting role, so I just did it as best I could, took the money and ran! Richard Martin - or Dickie Martin, we called him - I knew him at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry.
He had been an actor there, and he gradually moved over to directing during his time there, and he remembered me and very kindly asked me to be in it.
My own approach to a part is just to read it and read it and read it.
I'm very fortunate with my memory, so by the time I've done that for a few days, it's all in there.
In the bath, on the loo, whatever.
Read it, read it, read it, and do it aloud and drive your wife crazy, but it goes in.
When you do that, to me, something happens in your mind and ideas come out.
There's just one shot as Tyler when there's been some action and he's in an underground room with Dortmun and the rest, and they're discussing what to do and everyone's being very frantic.
I'm speaking now because it's objective.
I've just seen the tape.
Tyler's just leaning against a wall, listening.
Quite transparent.
Listening, but conserving energy.
I don't know where that came from, because everybody else is rushing round saying, ''We must do this or that.
'' I'm sure Richard Martin said, ''How do you feel about this?'' And I said, ''I just want to'' When in doubt, do nothing! I found out afterwards that Jenny had been considered as a replacement for Carole Ann Ford as Susan, but they took time to decide.
I do remember that when Dickie Martin phoned me about it, he said, ''I can't actually offer it to you yet'' He was checking whether I'd be interested and whether I'd be able to do it.
''.
.
because they haven't quite decided how they want it done.
''Do they want a child, an early teenager, or do they want somebody grown up?'' I had to wait, so I suppose that's what they were deciding then.
Richard, as a director, he was lovely.
When you get directors who have been actors, they go one of two ways.
They either resent the fact they've not made it as an actor, and they become very hard on actors, or they do what Richard did, which was remember what it was like to be an actor, and treat actors that way, and that's what he did.
He had one fault - he was too nice.
I met Jackie - again, I called her ''Jackie'' - on that show.
She was terrifically kind and friendly, and I liked her very much, and we got on very well.
She was very helpful because she had been in the series from the beginning.
She knew how it all ran and what the things were that you looked out for.
She was very generous in helping me and being friendly, and saying, ''If I was you'' kind of thing.
It wasn't until a few years later that she and her husband moved into a house opposite to us, and from then on, we became very great friends right up until the time of her death.
She died ten years ago next month, which is unbelievable to me.
We had daughters who were literally a few days apart from each other in age, they went to the same schools, we shared the car run.
We used to go to suppers with each other.
We did the OU together.
We were at the Open University.
We started that when our children grew up.
She said, ''What am I going to do ''now John's going away as well?'' That was her son.
I said I'd been thinking of doing the Open University, and she said, ''Right!'', and being Jackie, we were signed up in three days! She had this wonderful sort of bossy quality.
She was really great.
I remember her once saying to me, ''Well, when you've found out the best way to do things, ''it does seem a shame not to tell everybody else!'' I really loved her, and I still miss her very much.
She was a great girl.
Jacqueline Hill was just so beautiful and so charming, always in good humour.
My daughter and her partner, who were watching an old episode, said, ''God! She is so beautiful!'' And she was, she was just lovely.
And Carole Ann Ford was delightful.
I'd worked with her before in ''Expresso Bongo''.
She'd been my partner in that.
She's a very good actress.
And of course, William Hartnell.
Lots of good actors there.
And William Russell, of course.
Lovely actor.
We had a happy time really.
(BERNARD KAY) Bill Hartnell was I think he was a very fine actor and he'd done some wonderful work in things like ''Carry On Sergeant'', but he was quite quirky about his rights.
We rehearsed in a room which was London Transport Training Centre, and this room, you could have got a thousand people in there.
There were hundreds of identical chairs, and he had his name on the back of one of these chairs.
Jackie warned me very early on, ''Don't sit in his chair because he will not like it.
'' I noticed that even when he wasn't there, he hadn't been called in to rehearsal, nobody sat in that chair! I went to the props department - I was feeling very wicked - and got them to make one for each of the cast, and he was furious.
He really was furious.
He somehow felt his position was being undermined because we had our names on our chairs.
(PETER FRASER) The good thing about working with William Hartnell was he was always the character of the Doctor.
Off screen, he was the character of the Doctor.
So It was good.
It helps the actorme, it helps you to react and relate to him in the correct manner for the programme, and that's very important.
I was commuting between London and Madrid.
I was doing Doctor Who and ''Doctor Zhivago'', which was my first proper film.
He said, ''What's all this? ''Coming in from Heathrow with all your luggage? What are you doing?'' I said, ''I've got a nice little part on 'Doctor Zhivago''', and he said, ''Oh! They offered me a wonderful part on 'Zhivago' ''and I couldn't do it because of this!'' It was sweet, but there was also something a little bit bitter there.
I quite frankly found him a bit frightening and a bit grumpy, and I just kept clear of him, to be honest with you! I liked Bill Hartnell's portrayal of the character.
It was wonderfully detailed and eccentric and true.
And very true.
And I got on well with him.
We were driving after rehearsal - I think we were going to a costumer's.
We went round Berkeley Square.
We must have been going to Maurice Angel, the costumers.
We were driving through the road between Berkeley Square and Bond Street, and it happened to be where Hartnell was, who was the Royal family tailor or designer.
As we passed, Bill said, ''See that? ''That's my cousin up there.
The tailor, yes.
'' William Hartnell was a perfectionist, so if at some time he didn't seem in the best of humours, it was because he was worrying about a problem.
And he was much older than the rest of us, and he had those lines to get under his belt, so he was a very busy man.
I found him most charming.
He used to get betting tips from the crew and they all said, ''No, Bill, I don't want to give you a tip because'' ''Come on! You must know people.
'' And if the horse didn't win, he went for them.
He really went a blinder for them.
I always got on very well with Bill.
Not everybody did.
He could be a bristly old character.
(LAUGHS) I got on well with him and I managed to handle him all right, apart from one occasion when he came to dinner one evening, and my wife had gone to a lot of trouble to lay on a very good dinner, and he arrived something like two hours late.
We'd given up all hope.
The dinner was burnt to a cinder and everything.
Eventually, there was a knock-knock at the door, and there was Bill, and he greeted us by saying, ''Why can't you put a proper bloody number on your door?!'' He'd been driving round for two hours apparently! So we sat down at this mess of food that was left, then it went on till four o'clock in the morning.
We couldn't get rid of him then! He was a funny old boy.
He got me drinking scotch.
That's one of the happiest memories I have of him.
I drank gin till I met Bill.
He said scotch was better for me, so I started drinking scotch.
I can't remember which way round it was, but we went to Trafalgar Square.
I think that was first.
I was amazed that there were so many people knocking about, but I think they were young people who'd stayed up in town overnight, and were wandering about Trafalgar Square.
They were a bit bemused by us.
They weren't waiting for us to arrive.
Then we went down to Westminster Bridge and had to push Alan Judd across the bridge in a wheelchair.
We had to run as though the Daleks were pursuing us.
That wheelchair was heavy, and with Alan Judd in it as well.
We really had to push hard.
It was freezing.
It was coming up to Christmas.
We'd been hanging around for a long time.
I think we all felt the need to relieve ourselves, and there was nobody round about.
There certainly weren't any loos in Trafalgar Square, and I hit on the idea of using a grating.
And it was such a lovely picture, seeing a little queue of Daleks waiting to use the grating in Trafalgar Square! Nobody said anything and it worked! That's the main thing, it worked! The other thing I remember, which was a location shot, was, um I can't remember exactly where it was, but it was when I had to jump on the dust cart, which was moving and being driven by Jackie.
It was very old.
I think it must have been from the thirties, because it was in the sixties that we did these episodes.
It was very heavy for her to drive, and she said, ''You do realise I can't absolutely slow down? ''Do you think you'll be able to jump on?'' And I said, ''Yes, I think I will.
'' So I had to sort of leap on and she was driving away.
She was splendid, the way she drove this heavy old dust cart, and I leapt on and it all went well.
I rather enjoyed it.
It was great fun.
On the first day of being a Dalek, it was a bit worrying, because we had the lovely Jacqueline Hill and Ann Davies driving at us in this lorry, full tilt! Three Daleks, I think, were across the road, and the lorry's getting nearer and nearer, and just before she hit us, it was stopped, and I think they put an old Dalek in or something, and then the lorry went back, came in again and crashed into the Daleks.
It went ching! That was quite exciting.
I'm glad I wasn't in it.
My hair was really dark and I had it blonded for the production.
I think they didn't want to have two dark-haired youngish women in it, and Carole Ann Ford's hair was dark.
When we did the exterior location scenes, I hadn't at that point had my hair altered in colour, so that had to be disguised because we had decided on it, but I hadn't had it done.
I had to wear this terrible balaclava-cum-pixie hat to hide my hair, and that was the reason I had it on! Pushing the wheelchair may have been quite tough, but that was nothing to Robert Jewell, who was one of the Daleks.
I don't know whether people know that there were actors inside them, and that they had to push something like a bicycle inside the Dalek.
He had to come up out of the Thames.
That must have been really tough.
They did it in three shots.
They had a full Dalek under the water with a wire attached to the front, and they pulled it up the ramp till it got to a certain height.
The camera stopped, the machine stopped, they lifted the top off carefully so nothing was disturbed, then they lifted me into the Dalek and put the top back on again.
Then they pulled it up with the wire again till it got very low, and I was going like that with the eye, and then they stopped again because it was close to the pulling machine with the wire on it.
They had to move it that out of the way.
Everything was stopped again.
The camera was left there, the machine was left there, they disconnected everything, and off we went again.
Originally, the BBC said, ''They're not going to be visible, whoever operates the Daleks, ''so we'll just get whoever happens to be handy in the studio crew, ''and say, 'For this recording, you've got to sit inside a Dalek.
'''You just do this on cue.
You've got to go from there to there.
' ''There's no point in employing actors for this, ''when we have to pay extra money and the crew's there anyhow.
'' And they discovered, to their total amazement, that when it comes to timing and doing things precisely on cue, you need the professionals.
A thing that Jackie told me which was along the same lines, was that she and Carole Ann Ford were discussing their personal lives in a corner of the rehearsal room, and they were standing near a Dalek.
They thought it was just a Dalek machine with no one in it, and they were having this chat, very personal stuff.
They walked away and the scene started and this machine rolled towards them.
Somebody had been sitting in there, listening to their conversation! We couldn't get out unless someone came and took the top off for us.
If it was tea-time or lunchtime or whatever, everyone just zoomed, they'd gone, and we'd be knocking saying, ''Excuse me! Can someone let us out, please?'' (NICHOLAS SMITH) We'd go off for a coffee or go and chat and they would stay in their machines.
It looked like an empty studio, then someone would suddenly say, ''Have you got the time on you?'' and you were being addressed by a Dalek! Or you'd see cigarette smoke floating out of the top! That very first day, when I was introduced to this Dalek machine, there were one or two things you had to sort out.
For a start, you could sit down in the Dalek, and you moved around with a bicycle chain and pedals.
That's how you moved.
You had a gear stick up here to guide which way the wheels went.
You had to be put into these things.
They were very heavy.
It was like moulded plywood.
It was probably fibreglass or something.
So somebody had to put the top on.
Then you put in your various electrics.
You had the eye up here which was shifted manually.
You had a gun with sparks on down here.
There were a couple of lights on the side.
And that was it.
You could see It was quite tunnel vision.
You couldn't see very well, and you couldn't hear instructions on the floor very well.
It wasn't very comfortable.
You really were crunched up inside, and I'm not very big! Daleks were extremely heavy to manoeuvre, as I've said, and there were ramps that we had to go up from time to time.
We would try to go up and fail, and there would be a small body the other side pushing, very carefully keeping out of camera, making sure that we could get up all right.
One of the oddest things about the three episodes that I was in was a creature called the Slyther, which was an actor - not, I remember, a particularly tall actor - dressed in a rubber suit with what looked like leaves sticking out all over him.
He had to walk around slowly, growling.
He was lovely and rubbery, lots of tentacles, and really quite scary for children.
He was like something out of the sea, but the best part about him was that he throbbed.
So you would see him round corners, about to pounce on someone, and generally upsetting people, and the children went for it, because I got lots of Christmas cards that year, ''Dear Mr Slyther, have a nice Christmas, love from Rose, Fred and the kids.
'' They loved all that nastiness.
It had absolutely no connection whatever with the plot.
Whether it was a pet of the Daleks, or whether it had dropped in from another planet, we never discovered.
So this thing walked around, growling, and, as far as I know, it didn't do any harm.
I've a vague feeling it may have killed Paddy O'Connell's character in the end, but whether it ate him or not, I'm not sure! The first time the Slyther went out on screen, it was a Saturday night, and I had the ''Daily Mail'' on the phone to me straight away.
Presumably, it was a slow news week, but they wanted to know all about the Slyther.
Well, I didn't know what to tell them.
I didn't have any photographs, he didn't have any lines and it wasn't a very big part, so they came round to the house and tried to get a story.
He was Australian, of course.
(AUSTRALIAN ACCENT) ''So, Nicholas, you played the Slyther?'' I said, ''That's right.
'' He said, ''What does it look like?'' So I said, ''I'll draw it for you.
'' So I drew this terrible picture of this sack with tentacles, and tried to make it look as scary as possible.
He said, ''Oh, right, yes, I'll buy that.
''Now, how can we make this a story connected to you? ''Got any children?'' I said, ''No, not so far.
'' ''Got any animals?'' ''No.
'' He was looking round the walls and saw various pictures and said, ''I see you're into art.
'' I said, ''Well, not really'', but we went out into the garden and took pictures of me being jolly and young, and pictures of me with a cigarette with smoke going up looking all sinister.
''Nick Evans, who plays the Slyther.
'' I was very pleased to get all the attention, but very surprised.
The Slyther didn't appear again after that, because that nasty William Russell killed it, if you remember, with a rock.
Shame, shame! When you rehearse, you have no problems from the point of view of the action.
You rehearse for four days.
When you go into the studio and the set's built, then there are complications, because where you thought the camera could move, it can't.
It's too big.
Or two cameras are virtually filming in the same direction, so one of them's redundant.
You must use cameras to get the maximum out of them, which makes it difficult for the director.
It's very difficult in the studio.
There was such a quick turnaround, you see? If you were filming, you filmed on the Sunday, £25! Then you'd start your next script on the Monday, and on the Thursday you would have a run-through for your technicians, and Verity Lambert would come and see what had been done, all the problems, all the camera angles, whether the scenery was right for what was needed for the storyline, and then you would actually record it on the Friday.
When we rehearse, we rehearse with tapes on the floor.
They represent the doors, the walls, the sewer.
That's in the rehearsals room.
Then when you come into the studio, everything is there, but not everything is - the water isn't there until the actual recording.
They added the water and I stepped in and destroyed a pair of good shoes! That's the mean Scotsman in me that remembers that! There was one wonderful day when about ten Daleks had to stream out of a machine, and they all caught the sides of the Adjustments had to be made very hurriedly.
I don't think they realised they were quite so broad or so heavy.
They were extremely heavy.
They're extremely heavy to push along.
Later on, they got rid of the pedals and chain, and you moved it around with your feet.
It was lighter and you were more mobile.
One thing about Doctor Who in those days - it changed a lot later on with different Doctors coming in - was that it was done very much on the cheap.
I think probably, ''It's only for kids so it doesn't really matter.
''Don't need to spend any money on it.
'' We rehearsed for four or five days, and had one day in the studio to do this very complicated, technical stuff.
There was one sequence in which the three heroes, the three younger people, I couldn't remember exactly who, were supposed to be fastened to a metallic wall, with these very futuristic magnets.
And somebody had made a sort of three-quarters thing like this, such as Daleks might have produced, and they fitted round your neck with magnets in and were stuck to a wall.
And the props were beautifully made.
The BBC prop department, as I know from ''Are You Being Served?'', were absolutely brilliant and they could make anything.
They'd made these and then someone said, ''We need some magnets to put in them.
'' They went to Woolworth's and got these little magnets.
You put them on the wall and they fell off, so these characters who were supposed to be magnetised to the wall, had to hold these things in place, otherwise they'd have dropped off! I was in Wardrobe in the studios one day, and the monitors were going, the screens with all the storyline on, and we could see what was happening.
I think I was being changed into the Slyther outfit.
On the screen, we could see the Robomen.
They'd turned against the Daleks, and they were fighting like fury and getting really cross with them.
There's a great close-up of several Robomen throwing a Dalek in the air, up and catching it, and up and catching it again.
And one rather camp dresser gentleman said to another, ''Oh, dear.
What's going on there?'' And the other one said, ''I don't know.
Perhaps it's its birthday.
'' (PETER FRASER) The scene with the fish with Carole Ann Ford.
I remember that, and it's a strange thing, I don't remember it happily because I was never really happy about doing it.
I thought it was a bit twee, what you would expect in that situation, and I try never to give anybody what they want in that situation, the audience, I mean, but the director wanted it that way.
What I felt about it was the scene from the outset, of how I came into the scene with the fish, the whole scene was leaning towards the end which would be It would end up in a kiss or a kiss and a cuddle or something like that.
I was very pleased to have a contract for six weeks, but I was surprised when I found I was being a Dalek operator.
Never mind, I just got on with it, but professionally, it wasn't going to do me a great deal of good.
This isn't being snobby.
You really try and do a better job each time.
Go up a notch if you can.
Being a Dalek operator, one was on a par with the extras.
Fair enough, good people that they are.
I thought, ''What I'll do is have my name taken off the credits'', and then no one will know that it's me in the machine.
I think they were off three of the credits and they were on three of the credits.
That's why people have got confused about whether I was in them or not.
I did a great deal more than people know about.
I just did it, was pleased to do it, took the money I think I got 40 guineas per programme.
A guinea, folks, was a pound with a shilling added on.
The BBC paid in guineas in those days! I don't know why! Really, that was the end of it.
I thought no more about it.
And for some 20 or 30 years, the fact that I'd been in Doctor Who was just a dim memory.
Over the last ten years, people have asked for my autograph because I was in Doctor Who! They know far more about it than I do! After doing that programme The strange thing was, everybody in the business knew I'd been in it, but it didn't mean that people gave me a job because it was successful.
But everybody knew about me having been in it - I mean casting directors and other directors.
That doesn't mean to say that they didn't know I'd done the plays at the Royal Court theatre, or other successful TV shows, but everybody knew about it.
When I do pantomime, I have Dalek fans turning up with pictures of Daleks, pictures of me, wanting a photograph taken with me.
It's extraordinary.
Perfectly nice people in their 30s, but really keen on Daleks.
More people stopped me in the street after that, than Two years earlier, I'd done ''Deadline Midnight'' for six months.
This had six episodes, yet more people stopped me in the street to talk about the programme.
If I'm at a party and I'm not getting any attention but I'd like some, I'll just drop into the conversation that I used to be a Dalek, and suddenly you've got people's interest! (ANN DAVIES) I think Daleks had this combination of being quite Perhaps frightening at the time.
Young children hid behind the sofa now and again.
But they had an almost comedy edge to them, and there were a lot of children who used to get the sink plunger out, and pretend to be a Dalek, and go around going, ''Exterminate!'' to each other.
So there was that in those days.
People have talked to me, grown up, and children at that time, and there's no question they were absolutely fascinated by them.
But the appeal? The unknown, I suppose.
They didn't know what was going to happen next, and it wasn't a human being you were dealing with, it was something from another planet.
You didn't know how it was going to react or behave.
Ooh! Exciting! The voice spoken by a wonderful actor called Peter Hawkins at the time with that electronic distortion It was probably the first time it had ever been done.
The tone of voice was the thing which was very large, was a very large part of the popularity of the Daleks, and the fact that the Daleks were frightening.
A machine that spoke, and the fact that they shot rays and blanked people out, and they had a sink plunger attached to them which made me laugh, but I think the voice was a very large part of it.
I think it's the battle between good and evil, isn't it? It's the battle between the outsider and the people in power, or against the invader.
And that's a story that goes on for always, doesn't it? Personally, I found them .
.
boring! But if you look at them in terms of the programme, they were very interesting, because I don't think anything had ever been done like that before.
People like Dick I can't remember the initials of the author's name.
A great American writer.
He was writing science fiction stuff of that type, and people were in love with it, and this was the manifestation of it.
''I am a Dalek! Exterminate!'' The kids loved them! Well, you talk about the Daleks, but they were rubbish, weren't they, actually? I mean, look at them.
They had these funny steel domes that swivelled.
They had flat bottoms, and sometimes you saw the bottom if one got turned over in action.
They had these sink plungers sticking out the front, and another thing which sent the rays out, but they couldn't go anywhere.
I was very amused by the fact the Daleks could only move on level ground.
Here are these terrifying machines, and all you had to do was go upstairs and they couldn't get near you! There was one shot somewhere, I think it was the Albert Memorial.
They trundle along, stop at the flight of steps, and then you have to cut away because they can't go down the steps.
There's no way they can go down steps or climb a hill with rocks on it.
In fact, towards the end of ''Daleks' Invasion of Earth'', when everyone rebels, they just pick them up and throw them around like old dolls.
So they were rubbish, but they were wonderful rubbish.
Every now and then, the Daleks would make a Nazi salute, because they wanted to equate Daleks with Nazis taking over the world, so I think we did that on the Albert Memorial at one point.
Sort of stating their claim.
Good stuff.
Very effective.
Quite dramatic! The fact that the Daleks used Nazi phraseology like ''the final solution'', and ''exterminate'' and words like that, must have added an extra dimension to the story, a shadow across it.
It would remind people of things that had happened not long before, or that they'd been frightened would happen not that long before.
It's always marvellous in this business When you do a job, you see the script or you're cast, and you do it to the very best of your ability, and often you don't know that down the years they're going to become a cult or a classic.
That's what a classic is.
After a certain number of years, it achieves a popularity and a notoriety.
People just love it.
Doctor Who was successful, but the Daleks There'd been an episode of the Daleks before and that made it very successful.
Everybody knew that.
I mean that everybody involved in the production knew that, but when it was shown, everybody was stunned by the viewing figures.
They were fantastic.
Something like 11 or 12 million viewers for a Saturday night, for a half hour, which most of us thought was a children's programme! We were all stunned, at least I was stunned! You could have a whole family of kids and adults watching Doctor Who.
They'd go, ''Ooh! What's going to happen to our hero?'' But it wasn't really frightening.
There was none of this awful gut fear that you get in some films.
It was, in the best sense of the word, family entertainment.
There's the quality of magic, and it's a sort of ''Anything can happen!'' Anything can happen.
You can go inside the Tardis and be whisked away to another world.
It's a form of escape as well, in the way that films like the ''Harry Potter'' films are a form of escape.
I think that's always very popular, especially if it's well done! They weren't tied down to one situation.
They could go extra galactical, in the Earth, into history, into the future.
And it's the format.
The basic format never changed.
There was a crisis and people were going to get wiped out, or the Earth was going to blow up, and Doctor Who would sort it all out, but it was done in so many different ways, and that's what all adventure is - at the eleventh hour, all will be well! I really loved it, and I remember it much more than I remember other television things that I did round about that time.
It was just great fun.
The machines are fun, and I liked the people I was working with.
I knew Bernard Kay and Peter Fraser, and Jackie became quickly a friend, so I have very happy memories of it.
With regard to the programme itself, when I saw it after 39 years, it was made in 1964, I was surprised by how good it was.
I mean, that's looking back all these years.
Things have moved forward so quickly now.
Everything is ''Cut, cut, cut, cut!'' The framing is excellent.
Some of the performances are reasonable, some are not so good, but it had something, it had a quality.
It must have had something or it wouldn't have been a damn success! If it was made today, it would never go out.
Well, nobody would make it today, not like that .
.
simply because people expect more now in technical terms.
So the only way I hear that there's a lot of interest in it now, but it's nostalgic interest.
I think it's wonderful! I think it's really amazing and wonderful.
And I do get letters even now - I think a lot of people who were in Doctor Who do - from people asking for photos and signatures, and little stories about it.
There's a great interest in it.
It's really amazing.
My own view about the popularity of Doctor Who as a series or as a series of series, is the sort of Merlin character of the Doctor himself.
That he is the old, wise, grandfather figure.
As I say, he is Merlin.
He's the sorcerer, and he's one thousand years old or more.
Watching the story now It is such a long time ago, I've practically forgotten it all, so it's completely new and jolly interesting.
I'm part of television history, aren't I? If Doctor Who came back and I had the slightest chance I would absolutely jump at it.
I would certainly grow a full white beard again.
I've probably got one hair left.
I'd let that grow a bit longer, and I'd ask the make-up people to age me up.
I'm 68 now, but he's a lot older than that, and ought to look it, and if you think Bill Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, they were all older actors and I'm sure that's what ought to be done.
So put in a plug, Nicholas Smith as Doctor Who!