Evil of the Daleks

It's a great pity that we have any footage at all from the explosive battle that closes Episode 7 of "Evil of the Daleks", let alone reality-shredding works-in-progress including the intruding hands of effects experts and the like. This really ought to be one of the great mythical Doctor Who scenes, and to have to accept that it's basically dreadful without even having the rest of the episode as compensation is bad luck in the extreme.

The problem of course is the Daleks. Why couldn't they make decent toy Daleks in the sixties? I don't know. Perhaps kids have more pocket money these days, but there was really no excuse for someone not being able to knock up a decent looking Dalek. They are all cheap and incorrect imitations, bizarrely (and somewhat ironically) pepperpot-like in shape, with the dome never overjutting the slats or pointing straight down towards the base in the way they somehow manage to pull-off nowadays.

Far from being, as it sometimes seems, a long and loyal friend to Doctor Who, Louis Marx' (and no, I don't mean the bloke who wrote "Planet of Giants") inaccurate toy Dalek design ensured that every Dalek modelshot before about 1980 looks ludicrous. Disbelief has never had to be so suspended when watching those closing "Evil" scenes now, and ditto the dreadful shots of the "ten thousand Daleks" in "Planet". We can't unfortunately blame Louis Marx for every bit of rubbish model work in the series history, but they should certainly be held to account for the least convincing of it. And it wasn't just the BBC that were taken in - a few even creep into the "Doctor Who and the Daleks" film, naturally in the only really poor effects shots of the whole thing.

Maybe we should throw the blame at the technical bods who deemed those stout little toys a convincing substitute for proper models. It can't have been twenty years before someone actually decided to knock up some models from the original plans can it? Or perhaps Raymond Cusick kept the blueprints to himself as some form of bitter revenge plot directed at the show that failed to mint him.

There are fewer obvious Dalek model shots in eighties Who, but perhaps that speaks for itself; the best models are the ones that are indistinguishable from the real thing. I still think it's ironic though that the rise of the excellent Sevens models and the age of most fans having authentic, completely accurate Dalek models sitting on their bookshelves arrived as Doctor Who bowed out. If they'd had to make "Planet of the Daleks" for Season 26, they could have asked the fans to bring along a few decent models. We might even have good our genuine-looking Dalek army of thousands.

These days, you could probably drum up a Dalek army by issuing a summons to the owners of all the full-size replicas that are now in circulation. The days of the Earth being invaded by just three of them are over. But then, so really is the time of the model on a string, with any such shot these days being accomplished in CGI. Just our luck that it all came about too late to make that final end in "Evil" as impressive as it could have been.