Doctor Who - Documentary s12e06 Episode Script

By the end of the Jon Pertwee time Terry Nation had done a number of Dalek stories for us and, of course, he'd done a number for the black and white days, and we felt it was time he did another one.
So I got in touch with him through Terrance and Terrance said, ''Would you like to do another Dalek story?'' And so he said, ''I'd love to,'' and he was always very good on deadlines and everything, and he sent in a storyline.
I read it and I took it into Barry and he said, ''What's it like?'' And I said, ''Well, it's okay, you know.
It's good, solid Terry Nation stuff.
'' But I said, ''It's a bit sort of reminiscent, you see.
'' And Barry read it and then came to me afterward and said, ''I should think it is.
''He sold it to us last year and I'm not sure he didn't sell it to us the year before.
'' That anti-gravitational disc is to be brought here at once.
I obey.
LETTS: When Terry came in and he said, ''Well, how'd you like the story?'' I said, ''We think it's great.
The only snag is you've sold it to us twice already.
'' And Barry Barry very gently and kindly took him through it point by point.
They go with the bomb here, which you remember happened there, and then somebody gets caught here, and that's what happened there.
DICKS: And Terry, who was a lovely man, very amiable and charming, and he just sat back and beams and said, ''You're quite right.
''Yes, you are absolutely right.
Oh, dear.
'' We tried all sorts of other things.
Terrance suggested things, he did.
Terry Nation and I suggested things.
Nothing seemed really to gel.
And then I suddenly had an idea and I said, ''Look, I tell you what, ''you've never actually shown us the genesis of the Daleks, where they come from.
'' And I used those words.
So he went away and wrote this cracking storyline which developed into Genesis of the Daleks.
And he picked up my words and used it as the title, which was great.
It was the title, yeah.
I understand that the Genesis of the Daleks was in fact prepared initially by one team, that is producer Barry Letts and script editor Terry Dicks, and then handed over to the new regime, that is Philip Hinchcliffe coming in with Bob Holmes.
And that, in that sense, it changed.
It became a darker, a darker story.
I handed over to Philip Hinchcliffe and overlapped with him for quite a long time, for about three months, I think, as far as I remember.
I joined the BBC in, I think, spring of '74 to do another show, which in the end was cancelled because of a strike, and at the same time I was meant to sort of shadow Barry and Terrance.
So I had longer to shadow them than originally been planned, which was good.
So I did a hell of a lot of reading, science fiction reading, and grasped the technical side of the show and the ethos of the show.
Barry was very helpful, so was Terrance, and there was a really good handover, and I was sort of gently eased in.
It was sad to see Barry go because he was very much who I considered the one who shaped my character, my approach and my sense of what Doctor Who really What it can be about.
Yes, it was always very interesting when the production changed hands, either in the production level, or even the director level come to that, and especially when it was the Doctor level.
Everybody wanted to make or impose their own stamp on each one.
There was a kind of a limbo period when Barry and Terrance were leaving.
Bob Holmes was designated to get on with the next season, but there was no producer and no Doctor.
Barry had hired me and liked the first bits I'd done and the last thing I needed was someone else coming and saying, ''Look, this is the way we should go,'' you know.
So he again showed some tolerance.
He thought we better see how Tom will work out there, you see, because they didn't know.
They didn't really know at the BBC that I had no idea what I was doing.
When I took over, I inherited the next year's stories, or most of them, from my predecessors.
Well, in the same way, Philip inherited the stories that we'd set up for the following season.
When in doubt, go for your strongest sort of armament and that was the The Cybermen and the Daleks were the most popular monsters.
So they thought, ''Well, let's commission two strong stories.
''At least they are popular favourites coming back.
'' You know, that'll be a good sort of solid building, you know, foundation stone for the season.
And we were very keen to introduce, you and I, the Cybermen again.
And so was Bob Holmes when he joined.
Because the Daleks had been such a success, that why not bring back the Cybermen, who were the other very popular villains, the second most popular villain.
And here I was lumbered with two old bloody favourites, you know, the Cyber and the Dalek Oh, God, well, this is not what I really wanna do.
This belongs to another way of doing it, you know.
What are we gonna do here? I said to David, the first thing I said is, ''Let's make this much more pacey, generally.
''Let's just make it pacier, we'll edit it, pace'' ''When we see a Dalek, let's not just, ''you know, see this pepper pot trundling on the studio floor.
''Let's get low angles and let's make it powerful, let's find a way of, ''you know, making it appear more powerful than it really is ''when you look at it on the studio floor trundling around.
'' So David took all that on board.
We also talked, David and I, about the Time Lords and he said, ''No, I don't like the first scene either.
'' I said, ''You know, all that Chinesey'' I was most concerned that the opening episode, that is the scene between the Time Lord and Tom, was set in a heavily scented and perfumed, beautiful garden.
And this I didn't like at all.
You know, we want a mystery.
The Doctor's sort of starting on a mystery here.
Let's really, you know, start with a bang from the moment we start the whole thing.
So he said, ''I've got an idea for that, you know, sort of Bergmanesque sort of thing.
'' So he came up with the idea of doing that opening scene the way he did.
Ah.
Welcome, Doctor.
What's going on? So I changed it immediately into the Skaro war zone and set it in our usual quarry.
He got the message, David, that we want to somehow, you know, put a bomb up this whole Dalek world in a way and, you know, let's make it bit more sort of powerful and give it a bit more strength.
So the question, you know, they'd already decided on Hinchcliffe for Barry's successor, and Bob, you know, by that time was a regular writer for the series.
LETTS: Bob Holmes took over as script editor from Terrance Dicks.
I was very pleased about this.
He was one of our key writers.
He and Philip together produced things which were far more horrific than I think I would have done.
Bob Holmes had always been pushing the envelope horror-wise, I mean, like with Terror of the Autons, and he was always trying to sort of scare the little buggers.
And he had a penchant for the sort of the mordant and the darker, you know, side of things and, yeah, the sort of horror tradition and that.
Not because he wanted necessarily to produce those effects, but I think the actual story concepts interested him.
Bob Holmes, he smoked a pipe.
He smoked a pipe so I always think of him, you know, Old Holborn or smouldering old shag or something like that.
Powerful stuff.
So, for the first few times I met him in the office, of course, I couldn't see him very well, although my eyes were good, but there was so much smoke, I couldn't see him.
But Bob was, you know, by the time I knew him, he was a marvellous, rather world-weary old pro, you know, who'd seen it all and had a few drinks and was kind and really nothing surprised him much anymore.
And he used to tell me that Jon Pertwee used to say, ''Now, listen, Bob, you know what I like, I just like'' And Jon would adjust his frilly shirt, and he said, ''I just want a few moments of charm,'' you know.
And so Bob used to dish him up with the charm.
And with me, he said, you know, ''What do you like?'' I said, ''I don't really mind, really.
'' And so he and I got on terribly well together and I often used to tease him because I'd recognise where they'd pillaged the script from.
Him knowing perfectly well and he knew that I knew, of course, that most compositions of television scripts are nicked from somewhere else.
They are largely based on something else.
You know, it's not called plagiarism anymore, it's called homage.
Every one of his stories reflected a different type of horror that you'd, I mustn't say you thought you'd seen before, but you recognised.
Gothic horror, I suppose, describes it best but there was always something that you could latch on to.
Bob Holmes always had a gruesome side to him, you know.
I mean, I remember there was a line in The Time Warrior where somebody's threatening an enemy and he says, ''His wife shall crunch on his eyeballs in her soup ere nightfall.
'' And I looked at that and went, ''Yuck!'' and I said, ''You can't have that, Bob,'' and I just cut it, you see.
Now that, in Bob's day, that would have been in and I always acted as a restraining influence on Bob because he did have a taste for the Grand Guignol and the horror of everything.
And, of course, once my restraining influence was gone and Hinchcliffe just kind of egged him on, you know.
I mean, it did get a lot more violent and occasionally sadistic than certainly Barry would ever have tolerated.
Because Barry was stricter than I was about this kind of thing.
It was also part of the the development of public taste.
-People would accept it then -I guess.
But they went over the top because they found it was good for the viewing figures.
-Of course, but they didn't -They lacked your sense of moral responsibility.
But they didn't get hauled over the coals the way we did.
Ammunition is valuable and cannot be wasted.
-Yes, sir.
-For instance, when I've finished with these two animals, they'll be hanged.
Not taken out and shot as in the past.
He got what I was trying to do, which was to make the series more adult and to sort of push the boundaries to sort of make it more imaginative in a way, in terms of science fiction ideas, science fantasy ideas and And I think I responded to his sort of rather dark sort of humour and approach and encouraged him to go in that direction as well.
I don't know whether Dalek Genesis would have been any different if we had completed it as it were.
We started it off and I think the shape of it was pretty well set.
So I don't know really that it would.
I mean, the only thing I noticed about Genesis of the Daleks recently is that it is a very grim and dour story.
And I think if I'd been in charge of the script all the way through, I would have injected a few more lighter moments and a few moments of humour because I think the audience needs that in order to relax from the latest bit of tension.
And it is unremittingly dark, unremittingly bleak, and I think I might have altered that a little.
But not Generally speaking, it would have been pretty much the same.
I think Genesis of the Daleks was my third Dalek Doctor Who.
By this time I was getting into my stride and I could even say lines like this.
(DALEK VOICE) ''Our programming does not permit us to acknowledge ''that any creature is superior to the Daleks.
'' The fascist element of the Genesis of the Daleks was written into the script by Terry Nation.
I mean, Davros and the whole concept of Davros, was fascist.
I will command and you will obey.
You will do as I order! He took a sort of 20th century metaphor, in a way, with the sort of motif of the Nazis and eugenics.
-Heel clicking.
-Gestapo.
-The SS.
-The horrors of the holocaust.
The whole idea of one race demeaning another.
Margaret Thatcher meets the Nazis.
It's not even an allusion.
-I mean, the Kaleds are Nazis, you know.
-Yes.
I mean, they've got black uniforms, they do a Hitler salute.
People could identify with it to some extent.
It was a whole attitude, a whole ethos which they had seen before.
The knowledge and the feeling of the war was actually still quite fresh in a lot of people's minds, and, therefore, the Nazi uniform symbolised evil.
It had a very strong message, this story, which was that the world better watch out, our world, this world we live in, where, if morality is wiped out and there is no right and wrong, and if up pops a very ambitious, wicked man, or woman, but man probably, what can he not do with this world and what can he not do to us thousands and millions of people? Genocide, the name of the game.
It said a lot about fascism and the danger of allowing authoritarian politics to take over, you know.
And I liked that immensely.
Another thing that I liked was that the Thals and the Kaleds, the two sides in this war that had been going on for 1 00 years, neither of them, in the early stages, could be defined as definitely the villains or definitely the heroes.
The story creates, and we did this with design and our whole approach, creates a sort of world of evil where there is no acknowledgement of good really.
And it builds up, you know, we're in this sort of dark waste.
There's the wasteland, and we're in this city and that city There's no fresh No sort of daylight.
It's sort of a brooding The whole thing is a brooding story.
But at the end of the day, it's our Doctor fighting this supreme evil.
Which is characterised, you know, by a monster that we can look at and who talks to us, and he's personified in this wonderful, grotesque sort of, you know, way.
Getting back to the old Westerns, all the villains had black hats and all the heroes had white hats and at the end of every film, the villain always had to fall from a high place.
You know, metaphorically falling from grace or going down to the place downstairs.
Have pity.
Pity.
I have no understanding of the word.
It is not registered in my vocabulary bank.
Exterminate! I thought that the morality the good and evil aspect of the Genesis of the Daleks was the best thing that I'd ever seen Terry Nation write.
I think again, you know, what a writer is interested in and believes in will come out in his work.
And I think they were just preoccupations of Terry's.
LETTS: If Terry Nation had been a novelist, you would've called him a page-turner.
You always wanted to know what was going to happen next.
At this point in the programme, the Daleks were turning on Davros.
(DALEK VOICE) ''We are programmed to survive.
''We have the ability to develop in any way necessary ''to ensure that survival.
'' There is a scene between the Doctor and Davros when the Doctor says to Davros, ''If you held a phial in your hand which had this deadly virus ''that could wipe out creation, would you use it?'' And Davros answers, ''Yes.
'' I would do it.
That power would set me up above the gods.
And through the Daleks, I shall have that power! It's a moment where the hero meets the anti-hero and their two philosophies collide and you are appalled by Davros' answer.
But it's a wonderful way of bringing the two together.
They're not fighting, they're not grappling.
It's a sort of intellectual collision, intellectual grappling and meeting.
And it's at a wonderful point in the story, and then later, of course, in the story, it gets resolved.
You know, we have this scene with Tom and Kenny with the wires.
Just touch these two strands together and the Daleks are finished.
-Have I that right? -To destroy the Daleks? You can't doubt it! The scene where Tom, as the Doctor, needs to put the two wires together and he can destroy the Daleks, that they will never have happened, that they will be wiped out, which Sarah's character, and I think most people watching, I'm meant to be the people watching, would say, ''Yes, do it! We don't want evil creatures.
'' And there's the moral, the morality of the story that, ''Do you have the right to do it?'' I remember it being questioned a great deal in rehearsal.
I have a chance to actually destroy them as a race.
That's one of the themes.
And it was quite funny to do that, you know, the way I only had this two bits of wire, which would have started a car battery or something like that.
But if I kill, wipe out a whole intelligent life form, then I become like them.
Can he actually, himself, you know, wipe out next to, you know Obliterate another sort of race, another creature.
Tom's humanity, although he's a Time Lord, in a sense he represents humanity for us, you know, his humanity comes through and that's obviously the big difference.
So that's the counterpoint to the earlier phial scene, and then the death of Davros is sort of the payoff.
So those two scenes are quite crucial in the story and they just epitomise the moral dilemma.
But they do it very cleanly and with some very good dialogue, I think.
I mean, this was the one that we had so much stick from Mary Whitehouse, to say, ''This is not 6:00 viewing time.
You cannot do this.
'' I always used to say about Mary Whitehouse, if there was one thing she hated more than sex, it was Doctor Who.
And we had a history of trouble with her.
I mean way back at the time of the Auton stories, which were criticised for being, you know, too violent, too horrific.
(GASPING) John, are you all right? John? In Genesis of the Daleks, the first, you know, First World War The war sequences, you know, generally, of gas masks and gas and black clad soldiers, of being too frightening.
All I can say is that Barry was always very aware of and concerned of this dimension.
I was a bit more prepared than Barry to go over the top for a good story, you know, but he would Shock effect, you know.
But Barry would always keep things in check.
Bob Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe later on saw that Were less concerned with that aspect of things.
Though, as Barry charitably says, ''It's also changing times.
'' You know, they were doing it later than us.
So the show certainly did get more violent after us and probably upset Mrs Whitehouse even more.
And there was Nyder, betraying his closest colleagues physically, coshing Doctor Who on the head.
And Mary Whitehouse complained bitterly and we wrote back, at least the BBC wrote back, saying, ''Did you see the cosh?'' I said, ''Tell Mary Whitehouse if you look, ''the cosh actually slightly wobbles when you hit somebody.
'' So we are playing games.
It's called drama, it's not real life.
Well, the thing about television is you must remind yourself that for television, you can go very much further in frightening children, or putting frightening things on it, than you can in the cinema because of the informal context.
It happens at home, it happens when the children are looking at the camera the, er, receiver like that.
And then if they get frightened and look there, there's fish fingers or their granny or whatever it is.
So you can go very much further.
The other thing is that children watch things on many levels, don't they? And they quite like being frightened in the security of their own house.
In other words, they often pretend to be more frightened than they are.
All this stuff about hiding behind the sofa, you know, is often done It became a participatory programme because the children would hide behind the sofa or look through the crack of the door, knowing perfectly well that their grannies were enjoying this whole charade that was going on.
So they weren't just watching in that innocent way, they were taking part in it.
And so when they were very frightened, the little ones used to actually bury their heads in their grannies like that and the grannies, of course, loved that.
And for that reason, of course, grannies loved me.
I'm still quite sexually attractive to women over about 87.
You know, there are a lot of guns in Daleks.
There was a lot of you know, not just ''Oh, there it goes and bit of blood''and the monster runs.
They were very, you know not graphic like The Sweeney, but very, very dark moments, I feel.
Yeah, strong stuff for tea time of an afternoon.
But, on the other hand, I've always been a great believer that there's nothing that you can't say, really, in theatre, television, film.
All the people watching knew very well that this was primarily entertainment.
Quite often with a moral message for those who wish to spot it.
So the whole thing about how far you could go hardly entered into it except in slight areas when I, as the character of the Doctor, was being tortured.
There was a scene in one where I was being drowned.
Or the pain that Elisabeth and Ian had to go through in this one we're talking about.
But those scenes never lasted very long and I quickly gave in, didn't I? When it came to saving them from pain because, you know, ours was a Doctor Who was a simple morality of good triumphing over evil, you know, and it being Yes, it was very, very moral.
In fact, quite a lot of Doctor Who stuff, the moral side became a bit of a sermon, which we all managed, I hope, to mask, didn't we? Most of the time we did.
The Daleks started to turn on everybody now, even the Kaleds.
And so (DALEK VOICE) ''All inferior creatures are to be considered ''the enemy of the Daleks and destroyed.
'' One of the things with Doctor Who, you never know where you're gonna be.
You could be on a planet one instance, you could be down a mineshaft, you could be clinging onto the outside of a spaceship somewhere else.
And a lot of the atmosphere has to be provided by lighting, and, of course, scenery.
Thinking about the whole atmosphere of Doctor Who, I don't know, the lighting had an awful lot to do with it.
Tremendous amount.
Very often, I was working doing Dalek voices, it would be behind a monitor, but still, one saw on the monitor the effect and that effect would be quite important.
The darkness, the blackness.
The lighting director of Genesis of the Daleks was Duncan Brown.
It may have been the first time I'd worked with Duncan, but he'd obviously worked on Doctor Who before.
But he was a director that, lighting director, that had a particular sort of Was quite sensitive to the demands of drama.
And lighting a show like Doctor Who was always a problem because in those days the studios were top-lit by a grid at the top and had to be a compromise because you were shooting in continuous real time.
As always, Doctor Who is largely about corridors, and the bunker had more corridors than most.
Often it was the same corridor.
The art there is to try and just light the artists without lighting the walls at all.
That only requires the skill of setting lights properly and giving people slots of light to pass through.
Watch out for Duncan Brown's lighting throughout the story.
And see how lovely it is to create atmosphere through using, daring to use, real colours, such as a reddish purple sky when Daleks glide by at the top of your screen.
SLADEN: It's like a Western sky, you see where the lone horseman rides across, and there's the Dalek going along, unfeeling, unthinking, unmoving, but a killing machine.
He actually has lit those Daleks and some of those dark scenes beautifully.
And the sense of gloom, of course, comes out of again, comes straight out of one's head.
Well, actually comes from the script.
If you read the script properly, you would know what it feels like.
If you know what it feels like, the rest of it is up to you and is actually not that difficult.
It was all part of a thing of let's try and make the world of the Daleks, and Daleks themselves, emerge from the shadows and You don't see the joins so much in the scenery.
You don't actually see the Daleks are made of wood etcetera if you just take all that down.
But that takes a very good lighting director because it means there's more work to be done in the studio recording time.
It needs someone with an artistic sensitivity, but also someone who can work quickly and do it.
It all had to be done by suggestion and very clever lighting and putting ideas in your head that might not have been there before.
I'm actually quite surprised when I was shown Doctor Who after 30 odd years just how good it looked.
'Cause in my brain, I was looking at today's Doctor Who, which just seemed to be so much better.
But, in fact, the 30-year-old one stood up well.
It's something that's often underestimated in modern television.
Lighting is terribly important and can give an entire atmosphere to a show.
BROWN: People say whether it's art or not.
I'm not sure that it is.
The basis of my work is engineering and physics actually.
And that gives you the ability to know how things will happen.
The art bit, I think, merely comes from interpreting the script.
If the writer is pleased, that's the most important bit.
Now, I didn't do this next line.
Michael Wisher did it.
But it is one of the more famous lines of all because it's just at this point the Daleks are about to kill the Doctor.
(DALEK VOICE) ''Aliens.
I must exterminate.
'' It was a joy working on that Genesis of the Daleks and working with Tom.
He just approached everything with this lovely, lovely sense of humour.
I've never mentioned (MOBILE PHONE RINGING) Hold on.
No, hold on a minute.
Hello.
It's my first wife.
I love his -kind of wry humour.
-It's lovely.
Yeah.
SINER: He's an actor who's always struck me, even then, who Don't take this the wrong way, don't take this the wrong way, who didn't care about acting.
Just a minute.
Isn't it extraordinary? Where are you living What? Lisbon? And he had this wonderful gentle, wry delivery and this humour which seemed to be so The opposite of studied.
Are you married again? Yeah.
Oh, that's good.
Are you happy? Oh.
He was a magic guy.
He was very responsible, Tom.
He would not smoke in the street, for instance, because he said, ''A kid'll see me and say 'If it's good enough for Doctor Who, '''it's good enough for me.
''' So he was He brought that sort of responsibility to him.
Don't get all upset.
You know, I'm at work.
What? What? Oh, well.
There you go.
So Philip understood that, you know, and I'm very grateful for it, yeah.
Good.
Well, now he's gone, any chance of a cup of tea? -What? -Or coffee.
My friend and I have had a very trying experience.
-Haven't we had a trying experience? -Very trying, Doctor.
Step into the security scan.
What, no tea? The fact of the matter is I never really read the scripts, you know.
I only read my bits.
Because I really thought it was kind of a bit nosy, really, to read the others.
So at a read-through or anything like that, I would do a crossword puzzle.
I didn't really care about that.
I just sailed through it.
All the brass would go and then we'd start on the rehearsal.
But I didn't know anything about the scripts and I wasn't really interested in the scripts.
I was interested only in my bits because that's all I could influence, you know.
He walks through his work, however hard he's working, with a sense of not needing to be there.
And that's a very special talent.
And I think that's what makes him what he is.
-Come along.
-Where are we going? Er forward.
But coming with the euphoria is an enormous amount of adulation and respect and excitement, which adds to the euphoria.
So it was much better for me living the unreal life of Doctor Who with these other fictional characters, and being very well paid for it.
And then when we stepped out of those characters, out of the building, out of the costumes, the public, you see, would never allow us to step out of the fiction, and would respond in fiction.
So they responded to fiction, you know.
And because I was not a very competitive character, but rather a benevolent alien from somewhere else, it was very, very beguiling and very, very tempting to want to stay there, you know, and I stayed and stayed and stayed, as you know.
I think John Nathan-Turner was glad when I finally threw in my scarf.
This is a section where Davros is trying to save his last followers and he comes out and says, ''Have pity.
'' And this is how the Dalek replies.
(DALEK VOICE) ''Pity.
''I have no understanding of the word.
''It is not registered in my vocabulary.
''Exterminate!'' I do remember being absolutely fascinated by Davros.
It seemed a wonderful, wonderful idea that there was this man-creature-being who invented the Daleks.
Now this is my original drawing for Davros, which was 31 years ago.
And to start with, we were shown a Dalek andhere we are.
We used the base of a Dalek and then built Davros on top of it.
So, in Genesis of the Daleks, I was asked to produce this strange creature that had a Dalek base and he was built in with all his buttons and pushes in front of him.
And the designer, the other designer, John Friedlander, who was our resident sculptor agreed to come off another show, in fact, to make the actual mask and body.
When it came to Davros, I said to John Friedlander that I had remembered from my childhood this comic, called the Eagle, which had a space hero in it called Dan Dare.
And the big foe of Dan Dare was this The Mekon, who was a character who had virtually no body.
He was sort of incapacitated in some way, but he had this big, green dome-like head.
And I said to John, ''Look, I've just got a feeling that ''something like that might work.
'' There were lots of masks that John Friedlander produced.
And, in fact, they weren't just huge masks that fitted on like the Cybermen or anything like that.
They actually fitted onto the actor's face and had to be very carefully blended in so that his eyes would open and close and his mouth was usable.
And it looked as if it was part of him.
Sylvia James, the make-up artist, would've been involved in taking this basic latex mask that John had given us.
So he'd shaped it, but she had to give it texture, make it into a skin, a believable skin, match it in with the lower part of Michael Wisher's face so that it was convincing enough.
And this was quite a challenge to put the mask on, apply the mask, and sort of match it in also to facial tones.
You can't actually see the join where it transmutes from the latex into his jaw.
I needed to black his teeth out, in which I would've used black tooth enamel.
And also the lips, I remember particularly, which we needed to blacken.
You'll see it when he's talking.
It looks as if it's a real creature.
JAMES: The eyes, in fact, were gauzed over so that Which I would've matched in with make-up and also, of course, his hands.
His hand was, again, like a glove, really.
But it also had to look believable so that he was able to move it, so that it looked real.
All right, it's the voice.
It's the mask.
I think it's even down to those horrible fingers that sort of do the switches.
But it's toe-curling.
Also, his main eye.
The main, his central eye, which was, of course, attached but also had to, again, you had to feel that this was a real eye and it was really looking at you.
So that, you know, to a certain extent, you know, there was terror.
Terror there really, which I think He was really, as a character, very, very sinister.
It was horrific to look at and it was one of the best make-ups I think I've ever seen in my life as an actor because it was quite horrendous to look at.
Yes, I remember being very struck by Michael Wisher as Davros.
Especially given the era that we made this show.
That the voice, the body, the man-machine, the whole technical achievement of his performance.
-And Davros was a great creation.
-Yes.
I'd forgotten how effective Davros is when you first see him.
Somebody was saying that he was kind of overused later on, and perhaps not always used so well, but when you first see him, and he's a kind of embryo Dalek, and he's obviously created the Daleks in his own image, you know, that's great stuff.
-Very powerful stuff.
-Yeah.
I don't know whether it was in the scripting but the fact that when he got excited he sounded like a Dalek, or whether Michael Wisher did that, or whether it was the director David Maloney, I don't know, but it was very effective as Terrance was saying.
I suspect, I don't know what goes through people's minds when they cast these things.
I suspect they needed someone who could produce a Dalek-ish type voice at certain moments of hysteria.
And, therefore, I was one of the choices for that reason.
They didn't have to worry too much about looks since the mask more or less covered the whole head.
He was very fine-boned, Michael, he was a slim, slim man.
And you look at Davros now and it just He made the body It almost, like, disappeared even more.
It just was so narrow, the shoulders and everything.
You know, nothing was not thought through with Michael.
Nothing.
Nothing was left to chance or accident.
Oh, no, no.
Everything about Michael Wisher's performance, like any professional actor, had been worked out in advance.
But his capacity, 'cause he couldn't take off the make-up, to stay within that character Of course, the character was only written on two notes, you know.
The note of threatening cynicism and then hysteria when, you know, his megalomania struck him, but still in all, on only two notes, to be so compelling is a great achievement.
And anyway, there were some kids in the I suppose they were connected to someone powerful at the BBC, and they wanted to meet me, you know, and go and see Michael.
And so I said to Michael in advance, ''There's two kids from some big-shot at the BBC'' you know, ''I'll bring them round to see you,'' because he didn't leave his set.
I said, ''So let's put the ''Let's see if we can frighten them to death or something.
'' And so they came round and they looked in amazement at Michael sitting there, you know, so still that they just assumed he was a statue.
Of course, you know what's coming.
And I talked very warmly about how wonderful this character was.
The little boy said, ''Well, wait, doesn't he ever speak or anything like that?'' I said, ''Well, he certainly can hear what you're saying now.
''I mean, why don't you ''If you press that thing there, he might come to life and speak.
'' And so this cheeky little fellow put his hand out and Michael got him, you know.
What a blood curdling shriek.
It was absolutely wonderful, yes.
And the children fled down the corridor and, sadly, were never seen again.
He did have a very impish sense of humour as well.
But the first time he got out of the bottom half of the Davros-wheelie-Dalek, and he was in kilt, I nearly fell over.
He had kneepads on.
He said, ''No, no.
I'm not doing this to make you laugh.
''The reason I'm in a kilt is because trousers are very uncomfy.
'' Because you have to wheel yourself around inside the Dalek and it would rub, and he was uncomfortable, so he wore a kilt and the kneepads.
It would've been even funnier if the kilt had some bobbles on, wouldn't it? Like a Dalek skirt.
And then when we were shooting the show he, as Davros, would go in the canteen and he could actually eat, have his lunch with all the make-up on, because his lips and his mouth were completely free to take in food.
And he used to sit there in the canteen as Davros.
People used to do treble-takes as they passed him.
I think the actor Michael Wisher made really Gave a wonderful performance because he is the lead, second lead, in the series really.
He's the foe, he's the antagonist for the Doctor and you've got to have a very powerful antagonist to make the story work.
Those are the creeds of cowards.
The ones who will listen to a thousand viewpoints and try to satisfy them all.
Achievement comes through absolute power and power through strength.
They have lost.
Because he had this fantastic make-up and this weird face, rather frightening face as Davros, to get himself, I suppose, into the right mood during rehearsals, he would have a brown paper bag on his head.
He wanted to rehearse in the dark, in this claustrophobic situation which, after all, was what was gonna happen when he got into the studio.
You'd be surprised how disorientating it is.
You lose trace of time space.
And I suspected this, having worked in a mask before.
So I used to rehearse at the Hilton Acton, which is our name for the rehearsal room up there, in a wheelchair, an ordinary wheelchair.
And I thought, ''I know what's going to happen.
I'm going to get this mask on ''and I'm not going to be able to see or hear properly, ''and I won't be able to play the scene.
'' So I thought, ''The answer is, get used to the idea.
'' So I got myself a paper bag and just cut out a couple of tiny slits for the eyes so that I could just see, hazily, where I was going and what I was doing.
He put a shopping bag over I think it was Harvie and Hudson's of Jermyn Street.
It must have been a bag of mine, really, 'cause I was the only one who could afford to buy shirts there.
And so I gave him this bag and so it said ''Harvie and Hudson'' and because he was a heavy smoker, he would've died, obviously, with a fag on, but he couldn't live without a fag, so he made a hole in the top, then he made another hole While I was doing this stuff and he was doing it, he used to smoke inside the bag.
You couldn't see And the smoke used to go out through the chimneys at the top.
And he didn't find this at all funny because, of course, he couldn't see it, but we found it funny.
And because he insisted on being blind, he couldn't see that we were absolutely shaking with laughter all the time.
The other reason I used this paper bag theory was that when you rehearse and you say a line, people look at your face.
I'm talking to you now.
My eyebrows are raised because I'm trying to express something to you.
You see the way my lips can twitch, perhaps, or maybe a twinkle in the eye.
And you might want me to say it in a different way if you were a director.
You think you are influenced by the way, and now they're coming to get me now, by the way in which I'm talking.
But, in fact, you're equally influenced by my eyebrows, all of that.
Every aspect of my face influences you.
But they're not gonna see this when the mask is on.
They're not gonna see it at all.
So, paper bag, once again.
All they could actually hear in rehearsals was the voice.
They couldn't see anything at all except the hand 'cause I hid the other one down there.
INTERVIEWER: Is that rather like a radio technique? A radio acting technique? It had to be, to a certain extent, because the only expressive thing in the mask was the little blue light up there, which used to glow occasionally, when the batteries worked, at moments of extreme emotion for Davros.
But it did work, that, because had I not rehearsed in a paper bag, I'd have been lost.
And we did an amazing thing.
One lunch hour, you know, when it came to lunch David signalled lunch and we all crept out, leaving him there, you know, with his bag and his cigarette.
Of course, you know, after a few minutes he realised we'd tricked him and he came up.
But he was really very mysterious.
He didn't mention, he didn't say, ''You rotten buggers, ''you left me there with my head in a shirt bag.
'' He didn't say anything like that at all.
There was something very tightly focused, and that came out, finally, all that paid off in that stupendous, villainous performance as Davros.
In one way, Davros embodies the mad scientist who creates something which he, in the quest for all-consuming power, he creates a monster and then the monster consumes him.
I am your creator.
You must, you will obey me! We obey no one.
We are the superior beings.
Davros, of course, wanted pity from the Daleks and the Daleks at the end said, ''No, it's not in our vocabulary.
'' And he was hoist with his own petard.
Exterminate! (DAVROS SCREAMING) Now this is the finale.
The Daleks have been entombed, but they're not defeated.
Because eventually they're going to get out and wreak havoc upon the world.
(DALEK VOICE) ''We are entombed but we live on.
''This is only the beginning.
''We will prepare, we will grow stronger.
''When the time is right, we will emerge ''and take our rightful place as the supreme power ''of the universe!'' Genesis of the Daleks was my fifth story in which I played a Dalek.
I'd done four, I think, before that so I was pretty familiar with Dalek operating.
But I do remember that getting into the Dalek for the first time on that particular story, hoping that the inside of the Dalek would have had a few modifications.
Dalek operators, my gosh, how I admired them.
It's something I could never have done.
I mean, the business of getting into one of those outfits to start with, I mean, was difficult enough.
And once inside, two of the I remember several of them, but two of the Dalek operators I remember very, very well.
John Scott Martin, absolutely wonderful, and Cy Town.
It was great competition between the two of them, of course.
Who's going to play alpha and who's going to play beta? Butgreat.
We had a strict pecking order.
John Scott Martin, who had been a Dalek operator for a long time, was number one, I was number two and number three varied.
People thought half the time there were hundreds of them.
They never realised there were, perhaps, four, plus a couple of extra lads at any one time.
I don't know whether there is a maximum size to being a Dalek operator but you could not be a great, big, tall, massive man.
You wouldn't have got into the thing to start with.
The Dalek operators just sat on a little bicycle seat saddle.
I got in once and tried it.
I thought After five minutes, I couldn't have gone any longer.
Well, first of all, think of yourself sitting in a wooden bath chair at Eastbourne or at Brighton.
In this bath chair is a seat which you sit on, tie yourself in, so that when you moved, it moved.
TOWN: In those days, operating the Dalek from the inside, as I said, was pretty primitive.
We moved the thing with our knees and feet.
We all had our own particular ways of operating the Dalek.
I liked to be well padded into mine with lots of foam rubber so that I felt, if you like, at one with my Dalek.
The top then went on.
This top had all the controls in it.
A periscope, which you see children in the street doing the Dalek.
The switch, I should say, to operate the lights, was somewhere down here.
So that if we had got to do things with the eye, do things with the gun or the plunger, and if we had some dialogue for which we had to operate the lights, we needed another pair of hands.
I always said it helped if you were an octopus with the Dalek because you were probably pressing that, moving the business with your nose, firing a gun with your hand.
TOWN: Because we had to operate the little lights on the top, maddeningly, we had to learn all the dialogue even though we didn't, in fact, do the voices.
At rehearsals we did the whole thing.
The voices came in always at the last moment and just read it.
I enjoyed playing the Daleks very, very much.
I think as an actor, it's always so much more fun playing the baddies of this world.
It's easier to play the baddies, actually.
I still think comedy is the most difficult thing of all to play.
But if you It's wonderful to get to grips with a real, real evil being because you can stretch yourself no end.
And one did.
Although you had, with Daleks, you had a flat tone much of the time.
But still the evil emotion could still come through your voice, which I found fascinating.
And I was asked, actually, to do a Dalek voice over the telephoin Telephoin? Telephone.
This voice at the other end said, ''Can you do a Dalek voice? And I said, ''Of course, of course.
'' Total confidence.
''Yes, of course.
''I can do a Dalek voice.
I can do any voice.
'' ''For £25 I'll do anything you like,'' you know.
And they said, ''Well, can you give us a sample of your Dalek voice?'' I said, ''Certainly, I am speaking on the telephone in a Dalek voice now.
''Dalek voices are quite easy because there are only basically three.
'' And the three are divided into, ''High, ''medium ''and low.
'' And the low one is usually the guv'nor.
''He is the authoritative one.
''His word is law.
'' Then there is the more sensible ''Medium range one ''who dishes out orders: Pursue.
'' Then there is the higher sort of minion one.
When they've got two on at the same time, they've got to have a higher one to distinguish between the two.
You can't just go by the blinking ears, you know.
''And the high one is up there somewhere.
'' We think of the Dalek on set with his light flashing and in synchronisation with whatever words were being said and the voice of the Dalek off set, looking at a monitor, knowing the lines, obviously having a script if necessary.
The problem would arise if, and shall I say an ordinary actor, in UNIT or whatever it is got too near those actors who were doing the voices, they could sound the same.
They stick you in a corner of the studio, you see, in a sort of ornithologist's hide, which is made of canvas, or whatever they can get, and poles, and they put this screen round you and a table and a TV monitor and a script and a pair of earphones and this microphone, which is rather like the microphones they use at Wincanton races, you know.
And in your earphones, this ear, you can hear what goes on on the floor, what the actors are saying.
And in this one, you can hear what they are saying up in the control box up there.
Blackmail time.
It's wonderful.
You can hear all the comments about everybody.
And you have to try and match your voice with the flickering of the ears of the Dalek.
It's great fun.
INTERVIEWER: Is it difficult? It's rather like being in air traffic control at London Airport.
Yes.
The Dalek's flash, you try to sync to it but in fairness, the Dalek operators inside the Daleks were the ones who took the timing really from you.
And they were good, absolutely brilliant.
Because to be in one of those things is, wow, that was something else.
I do remember on the Victorian one, coming through Victorian room you'd hear them coming out 'cause we were in a little flat just behind one of the exits and entrances of the set and you could hear the swearing that came out from them as they banged their knees and God knows what else they did.
And people said, ''Oh, how do you do it?'' I said, ''Well, you've got to believe in what you're doing.
'' It's as straight as a pantomime cow believing what he's doing.
It's no good saying they're just a wooden affair in a box.
They were Daleks.
Terrifying.
One of the fascinating things to me always with playing the Daleks, or playing any character for that matter, is to find the basic thing underneath.
And what actually happened very much with the Daleks is that you become, in an odd sort of way, that power takes over from you, takes over.
It becomes an integral part of what you are.
You believe totally in the lines when they're coming out.
Absolutely, totally, 'cause that's the only way to do it.
Absolutely, totally.
I mean, the terrible thing to a Dalek is that it has to be successful in everything it does.
And if it is not successful, if it for some reason cannot carry out an order it's a failure.
And poor darling, it just gives up.
It goes something like (DALEK VOICE) I have failed.
I have failed.
Self-destruct, I have failed.
Self-destruct, I have failed.
Destruct, failed.
Destruct.
Self-destruct, I have failed.
Destruct failed.
Destruct failed (IMITATING AN EXPLOSION) And the whole thing blows up into millions of pieces and splatters itself around the area.
The great thing about Doctor Who was that we were always short of money, short of actors, short of extras.
We always tried to do things in a big way.
BROWN: If we'd been given more time and more budget, would it have been a better programme? I often think, no, it wouldn't.
Because, as I say, it was on the lower level of programming and it had the junior staffing, like me, everybody tried their hardest.
And the pressure of doing it in time and doing it in a certain amount of money, probably created artistry that might not have emerged otherwise.
I think this probably was one of the big Doctor Who classics.
All the effects we did, you know, worked.
And it really rolled along at quite a pace.
All the actors did A lot of them overacting, of course.
They really put everything into it.
When I was looking at Genesis of the Daleks, which I didn't see at that time, and I don't remember ever seeing it before, I was actually very, very taken by this melodrama and thought it was funny and ironical.
You know, and full of tension and marvellous Maloney, of course, directed it.
Beautifully lit.
It was just so satisfying and so full of fun and everyone getting, you know, his moments.
You know, Peter Miles as the sinister kind of Nazi, it was a wonderful, wonderful performance.
It is almost a perfect jigsaw puzzle where everything fits in.
You have the era when Doctor Who was so-called at its peak, and fans call it the golden age of Doctor Who.
Along came Tom Baker, and after a few stories, there he was with me in Genesis, with Terry Nation's wonderful storyline, very powerful, with a superb script for the actors to get hold of.
Maybe the way we are talking now might just illuminate or amuse the fans of the programme.
To remind them, of course, that with hindsight we see all sorts of things that we didn't see at the time.
At the time, I wasn't aware of how good it was, how good it was going to be, 'cause after all we made one a week very quickly.
And our whole time was concerned simply with getting the show on.
So if it's now thought of so highly, I can only be delighted.
When I'm thinking about it now, the years have been merciless to me, you know.
It's rather like these old stories, at that time, we were just doing them.
At that time, I was filled with lust or love or infatuation, whatever it is.
But then after the years go by, it's a different perspective, you know.
I mean, we just do these sort of things to amuse our fans, don't we? I mean, it's a pity they aren't here now to ask me any other simple question about what I felt about it all.
Don't you feel grubby and dirty having worn the same clothes for all this time Look, if you've got a Dalek up your arse, you don't worry about your jumper, do you, Ian?