First Doctor

Episode 23: The Romans

/ Kari / Leave a comment

The First Doctor and his team go to ancient Rome and hang in Nero’s court.  But does the Daleks Aren’t Robots!? team feel this serial has the favor of the gods…or cast it to the lions?

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

The Tardis falls off a cliff and the team LEAVES HER THERE to hang out in an Imperial-era Roman city as a vacation. The Doctor and Vicki go to Rome out of curiosity, the Doctor assuming the identity of a murdered lyre player on the way to Nero’s court. Meanwhile Barbara and Ian are kidnapped by slavers.

Ian ends up as an oarsman on a galley and Barbara gets creeped on and sold to Tavius, who works for Nero. An assassin tries to murder the Doctor, and gets his butt roundly kicked and tossed out a window by Vicki.

Nero creepily chases Barbara around and the show thinks this is funny (it is not), and Nero’s wife Empress Poppaea tries to kill Barb with poison. Vicki almost poisons Nero but the Doctor saves him and then fakes playing the lyre in a hilariouos Emperor’s New Clothes scenario. Nero decides to feed the Doctor to the lions because his playing is TOO GOOD.

Ian fights in the arena in front of Nero and Barbara and escapes, and then returns to rescue Barb. The Doctor accidentally sets Nero’s diagram of Rome on fire and Nero decides to burn Rome down so he can build it to his liking.

Tavius helps Barb and Ian escape and is revealed to be a Christian (because he has a cross around his neck). They all return to the Roman villa they were squatting in and then depart the era, the Doctor revealing that the Tardis is stuck somewhere and being dragged down.

OUR TEAM

This is so the Doctor‘s serial. He has SO many moments when he’s at his trickster best in this one it’s actually amazing.

  • When an assassin attacks him, he defends himself adequately and actually gets irritated with Vicki when she comes and helps him out because he was having fun beating the crap out of the hapless would-be killer.
  • He skillfully deflects an attempt to get him to play by buttering up Nero and deferring to him with great respect and admiration.
  • He pulls an AMAZING “Emperor’s New Clothes” stunt and plays “so delicately no one can hear him” and everyone admires it… and it works too well, convincing Nero to have him killed because HE’S TOO GOOD AT THE LYRE.
  • Finally he “accidentally” (it is not clear if it is an accident) burns Nero’s plans for a rebuilt Rome and inspires Nero to burn down the city himself. (Nero was accused of burning the city down but these accusations are not exactly reliable as Nero was hated by the upper class at the time. He also allegedly blamed Christians for the fire but that ALSO may not be correct. Honestly Rome didn’t need help to be on fire, it was on fire ALL THE FUCKING TIME regardless; there’s a reason Crassus got as ridiculously wealthy as he did, you know?)
  • And he has this amazing evil laugh when he realized HE CAUSED THE GREAT FIRE OF ROME at the end.

Vicki doesn’t do a LOT here but she has a couple good moments. I’m actually starting to like her!

  • She is demonstrably curious about Rome and excited to see new places and times, and has a bit of a mischievous streak like the Doctor’s. He’s probably a bad influence.
  • When the Doctor is being attacked she doesn’t hesitate to help him and ends up pushing the attacker out the window kind of.
  • When the court poisoner is going to poison a slave (unbeknownst to Vicki it’s Barbara) she switches the goblets to kill Nero instead, only stopped by the Doctor.

Ian has finally relaxed.

  • Barb changes his hair to look more Roman. He seems pretty happy and cheerful at the beginning of this, and also at the end, and he has a lot of great chemistry with Barbara, joking around with her. He doesn’t hesitate to fight at any point either so we get lots of Action Physicist here.
  • It super bugged me that he was wearing a TOGA and it appeared to be a toga with a stripe, too? That’s usually something fancy worn by someone of rank, OR A CHILD, like a toga praetexta would mean that you were an IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE GOVERNMENT, like a consul. They would not try to enslave an adult man wearing those clothes who spoke perfect Roman Latin. That is a posh person and you don’t wanna go there.

Barbara gets the short end of the stick in this episode.

  • She was much more proactive in the Aztecs, and while she doesn’t exactly lie back and think of England here, she’s slow to attempt escape and she isn’t as smart about it as she has been in the past. She does look great, and she does have plenty of pluck, but that’s it. She’s not as devious and ruthless as we’ve seen her in the past, and that’s a pity.
  • Her outfit is also a bit more of a Halloween costume than anything a Roman lady would have worn. There’d be about two more layers probably, and if not it would probably just be a tunic since she isn’t married.

OTHER CHARACTERS

  1. Nero is the emperor, and for the most part it’s a pretty good rendition if it weren’t for the fact that he’s presented as a silly buffoon. He does personally kill one person and chases Barbara around which is EXTREMELY horrifying but the show doesn’t seem to realize it. He’s a lot less gay than he should’ve been too. At one point Nero married a man and played the bride.
  2. Tavius is a servant of Nero who purchases slaves for the household and also encourages an assassin to come and kill Nero. And he also seems to kill someone himself in order to keep the assassin (who the Doctor is masquerading as) safe. This is not really in keeping with the Christianity of the time! Yes, he is revealed to be a Christian by a cross around his neck (which was not a symbol Christians used at that time IIRC). Tavius is an interesting character, kind of the Varys of the piece, but it is not super clear what his goal really is or why.
  3. Poppaea, Nero’s wife, who is jealous of slave girl Barbara for SOME UNINTELLIGIBLE REASON when in real life I would think she’d be glad someone ELSE had Nero’s attention. Then again IRL she and Nero were both married to others when they got together so…. sure, I guess? Later she died, either because Nero killed her or in childbirth, who knows.
  4. Locusta, the court poisoner. Supposedly she helped kill the previous emperor, Claudius. She is eventually executed by Nero’s successor Galba so good on her!
  5. Some dumb, evil slavers and the guy the Doctor masquerades as, and Ian’s slave friend who helps him out a couple of times.

THE SETTING

  1. Imperial Rome in Nero’s era. I don’t know how accurate the geography is since they’re kind of vague about a lot of it. The costumes aren’t great, though they do look nice for the most part. The mores aren’t especially well-represented either, but that’s probably because it’s a kids’ show and that much gay and sex and violence wouldn’t be great for them (though apparently implied attempted rape is OK).
  2. Nero has painted toenails I think? Is that realistic?
  3. Also he uses thumbs down to indicate a gladiator should be killed, which is PROBABLY wrong. Thumbs up is killing them and a closed fist is sparing them.

THE SHOW

  1. Hartnell flubs a line or two here but he’s magnificent overall. How was his health doing at this point?
  2. Did any stuff from the Greekish part of Keys of Marinus get reused here?
  3. What did Vicki, Maureen O’Brien, think of her first full serial?

General

Reviews

Interviews with cast and crew

Locusta

Nail Varnish

Episode 20: The Rescue

/ Kari / Leave a comment

Welcoming special guest Blue aboard the Daleks Aren’t Robots TARDIS (DARDIS, if you will), we look at the first episode with the First Doctor’s new companion, Vicki.

Daleks Aren’t Robots!? is a podcast in which two Whovian friends take two non-Whovians on a deep dive through the show from the very beginning.

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

The Tardis lands on Dido (so I guess a woman immolating herself for a man DOES feature). There Barbara and the boys (Ian and the Doctor) are separated when a spiky looking alien fires a weaponlike object at Barbara. There is a crashed ship on Dido with a girl named Vicki and a man named Beckett in it; both of them fear someone named Koquillian, who sounds like he might be a native to the planet. Barbara meets Vicki, who tells her the Didoans killed ALL the other people on the ship who didn’t die in the crash. Barbara accidentally kills Vicki’s pet, Sandy, mistaking it for a monster.

The Doctor has been to Dido before and knows the people there, a small population that’s friendly and cool. It turns out that Bennett is Koquillian and he murdered a guy on the ship, and killed all the other survivors AND a bunch of Didoans to cover it up. Vicki didn’t know about it because she was a kid. Bennett has been using a Didoan temple and their holy gear in his masquerade; the Doctor confronts him there and almost dies, but two surviving Didoans intimidate Koquillian off a cliff. They take Vicki with them when they leave.

OUR TEAM

The Doctor: He’s a bit sad in this episode, clearly missing Susan. He’s a lot gentler to Barbara and Ian than usual, and he’s also super kind to Vicki. He might be seeking to fill the granddaughter-shaped hole in his heart. At one point he’s about to order Susan to open the door, says her name and then gets this sad look on his face. He’s very sweet with Vicki.

He figures out Koquillian isn’t who he seems. He also has a near-fatal moment of overconfidence when he confronts Bennett in the Didoan temple and Bennett kicks the crap out of him, until two Didoans come and save the day.

Ian: Ian is JOVIAL and cheerful in this episode. Maybe it’s just an effect of the Doctor being nicer, but he’s really grown a lot and removed the stick from his ass over the past season and a half.

Barbara: Barbara makes a rare mistake in this one, and kills Vicki’s pet monster when she mistakes it for, well, an actual monster. She grabs a flare gun and straight up murders the thing. She isn’t as apologetic as I would have expected, when she finds out it was a pet, which seems out of character for Barbara.

Vicki: The new girl! She seems more childish than Susan–is the actress younger as well? She’s also kind of… well, it was SUPER obvious that Bennett was Koquillian almost immediately. She seems kind of gullible.
She’s mad at Barbara for killing her pet, but that’s totally reasonable (even if the show doesn’t seem to think so). She does immediately have a rapport with the Doctor, and she’s pretty brave–she helped Barbara and hid her from Koquillian, and helped treat her wounds. She’s apparently an orphan (her father was in the wreck) and she’s from the future (she left earth in 2493 after her mom died).

She’s independent minded and doesn’t want people to feel sorry for her. She does have kind of a hysterical crying fit at one point, but it IS right after her pet was killed, so…

THE OTHERS

Bennett: The bad guy. He’s a murderer who killed the crash survivors AND did a genocide in order to hide his murder. He is not as scary as Reegan, but I was legitimately worried for the Doctor when he was trying to kill him at the end. His monster suit is pretty good, and for once there’s a damn good reason it looks like a guy in a suit!

Two Didoans: They don’t say anything, they just stop Bennett from murdering the Doctor and intimidate him off the cliff. They’re just wearing white coveralls with capelets and boots.

A couple of ADORABLE monsters who are obviously just a guy in a lobster/lizard suit lying on the ground. I’m sure there are no toys of it for STUPID reasons. The monster-pet that Barbara kills is named Sandy and it appears to have light-up eyes.

THE SETTING

  1. There are some adorable miniatures of the broken spaceship.
  2. There are some rad Indiana Jones style traps in the cave where the Tardis lands, and they are escaped very sensibly too. There’s kind of a neatly-made wall that looks like a monster’s face–the monsters we see, maybe.
  3. The spaceship wreck interiors look good; the planet Dido looks OK too. I didn’t notice anything all that unusual or special about them.
  4. The temple set at the end looks cool, with some pillars and a chest I think?

THE PRODUCTION

  1. Why Vicki? Why did they choose that actress? Why did they choose that character? How old is the actress? How will she be different from Susan? What did fans think of Vicki?
  2. Was it meant to be obvious that Bennett was Koko?
  3. The mini spaceship was adorable, is this from the same miniaturist that made the other minis? It’s so charming and cute.
  4. They have kind of a large, cool looking flashlight at one point, is it a normal flashlight?

General

Vicki

Contemporary Articles

Sean Connery (no, really)

Opinion: A “Jolly Good Smacked Bottom”

/ Zach / Leave a comment

Recently our podcast covered “The Dalek Invasion of Earth.”

At the time, there was some discussion about the “What you need is a jolly good smacked bottom!” line that the First Doctor says to Susan, his granddaughter.

In this situation, though, we did kind of just move on from it: given the way the Doctor says the line it seems quite obvious he has no intention of doing it, and is more concerned and scared for Susan’s safety. It is still sexist and not a good line.

It’s hard to find out where this line came from; it is claimed it is not in the original Terry Nation script, and is generally attributed to an ad lib by William Hartnell.

Now the First Doctor, as we have discussed, does have a lot of British paternalistic qualities and sexist elements. A lot of this does come from the time but it is still there. However, as we have also discussed, the show notices these and generally shows more nuance than you would expect with the character especially given that it was produced in the 1960s.

But if it isn’t that big of an issue in the episode, why do I feel the need to bring it up? Because on Dec. 25, 2017, more than 50 years later, the line came up again in Peter Capaldi’s final episode as the Twelfth Doctor and Steven Moffat’s last episode as showrunner, “Twice Upon A Time.”

In “Twice Upon A Time,” the First Doctor (played by David Bradley) and the Twelfth Doctor meet, right before they both are to regenerate. Moffat did intend this to be a cyclical thing showing how the character has changed and how they haven’t. Additionally, this episode wasn’t meant to happen when it did — Moffat wanted to complete his run with the end of Capaldi’s final season.

However, Chibnall did not want to start with a Christmas special, and if the show didn’t have a Christmas special, Doctor Who would have lost the Christmas special slot permanently. This meant Moffat had to rush to write and record a whole extra episode while still having basically wrapped the Twelfth Doctor’s story at the end of his final season. Meanwhile, Paul Cornell was writing the novelization at the same time the episode was being written, and they had to cut 30 minutes from the final episode.

Some of the issues I have can thus be explained, but I am judging based on what we got on screen.

The portrayal of the First Doctor that ended up on our screens for this episode seemed to be based fully on the “smacked bottom” line and sexist attitudes of the 1960s. They even had the First Doctor say that line to a woman he was not related to and had just met.

This is played as a joke in the episode, and it isn’t the only one. One of the only character traits Moffat plays up in the aired episode is how sexist and out-of-touch with the modern day the First Doctor was. Which is certainy an aspect of the character having been written and portrayed in the 1960’s we can’t ignore that aspect of the character,however Moffat exxaggarates an highlights no other aspects of the character.

In other post-Hartnell appearances, the First Doctor has often fared better; for example, in “The Five Doctors,” he is portrayed as being the most knowledgeable and experienced of all the incarnations.

This may have been Moffat’s way of popping that fan view… which is a complete misunderstanding of who the First Doctor is.

Even this one line was not as bad as it sounds, as I explained earlier, and while the First Doctor certainly comes across as paternalistic, sexist, and from the 1960s there is more equality there that Moffat in the aired episode seems to ignore, basically boiling it down to the Twelfth Doctor being embarrassed by this sexist, rude past version of himself that is completely out of touch with current attitudes.

This is completely unlike any other portrayal of the First Doctor, and bordering on an insult in how it is handled.

While it has been argued that instead of just the First Doctor, Moffat was portraying the attitudes of the 1960s show in general, there was also racism then and the episode really doesn’t deal with that at all. Also, putting all that on the First Doctor still makes it a terrible characterization.

As I mentioned earlier, Cornell was working on a novelization at the same time as Moffat was writing the episode, and at least 30 minutes of the episode didn’t make it to the final version on screen.

Some of the problems with the rushed episode are fixed in the novelization. For example, in the book it is explained the First Doctor acted sexist and out-of-character to annoy the Twelfth Doctor because he didn’t like him, and in the book he tones it down as he begins to like this other incarnation of himself.

Whether or not this was the intention of Moffat’s on-screen version, it does not come across that way when watching the episode.

Also, I want to be clear: none of this is on David Bradley, who has portrayed Hartnell brilliantly in the Big Finish audios and in the docudrama “An Adventure in Space and Time.” Moffat may have intended to show a more nuanced version at some point but what came across was an awful “joke” that really did not work and instead came across as the worst interpretation of the First Doctor in a canon appearance.

Let me know if you agree or disagree, and either way, I hope you join us by listening to future and past episodes of Daleks Aren’t Robots!?

Sources:

Episode 16: The Dalek Invasion of Earth

/ Kari / Leave a comment

On this episode of Daleks Aren’t Robots!? we return to Hartnell and to the Daleks as we also say goodbye to a companion who has been with us from the beginning.

Daleks Aren’t Robots!? is a podcast in which two Whovian friends take two non-Whovians on a deep dive through the show from the very beginning.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/daleksarentrobots

Twitter: https://twitter.com/daleksrntrobots​

Find us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8ngosXDOzVLrJe4KIcW8Qg

Look for us where all podcasts are found.

Theme: Garage – Monplaisir

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

The Tardis FINALLY reaches London but it’s not the London Ian and Barbara came from. We know this because there’s a sign that says “Emergency Regulations: It is forbidden to dump bodies into the river.” Despite this a guy immediately dumps himself into the river.

Susan gets hurt trying to figure out when they are, the Tardis’s door gets blocked by rubble and the men go off to look for a way to remove the rubble. Some rebels show up and there is a flying saucer that is adorable. The boys find a whip and a guy packed into a box, which like… no comment.

Then a Dalek comes OUT OF THE WATER. There are aquatic Daleks now? WHAT.

It is the future, 2164. The Daleks are “masters of the planet,” are digging under Bedfordshire, and are able to turn humans into robots, but there’s still human resistance. The boys get taken onto the saucer, the girls meet more resistance people and the rebels plan to attack the Daleks. There’s a LOT of stuff with the rebels, a lot of whom die, and/or become robo-men. Eventually they go to Bedfordshire and find out the Daleks utterly absurd plan, which is to replace the planet’s core with an engine and turn the whole thing into a spaceship, which is not how any of this works, but whatever.

Barbara runs some Daleks over with a truck, a tiny alligator in a sewer menaces Susan, and a Dalek keeps a hilariously adorable monster called a Slyther as a pet. Everyone is reminded that the Daleks ARE the Nazis, actually, right down to firebombing London and being very fashy.

Eventually they manage to use the Daleks’ system to tell the robo-men to turn on the Daleks, there’s a massive rebellion and the Daleks are either killed or chased away, exploding into stock footage.

One of the rebels asks Susan to stay and she doesn’t want to have to choose between him and her grandfather, so the Doctor chooses for her and locks her out of the Tardis. She doesn’t object, though, and Susan leaves the show.

The end.

THE TEAM

THEY STOPPED SPLITTING UP ON PURPOSE.

  1. Susan leaves the show in this episode, which kinda sucks. While I can totally buy that she falls for the rebel David, there’s not enough of this relationship shown to make it plausible. Also, she’s given a few lines about how she doesn’t really have an identity, which is bull, and that they always just leave planets when there are problems. The thing is Susan HAS an identity and a pretty great character… when the writers bother with her at all. If only she’d stayed as smart and cool as she was in the first serial!
  2. The Doctor has some great moments in this one. His speech at the end to Susan is really touching, and he doesn’t ACTUALLY take the decision wholly out of her hands–had she said anything to stop him he probably wouldn’t have left her. He says some condescending stuff to her earlier on but in a way that makes it clear that he doesn’t really believe it, about how she needs to be “taken in hand” and stuff. There’s also a great series of scenes where he solves a Dalek puzzle and brags about how smart he is, only to be dragged away by the Daleks because he just proved he’s smart enough to be a robo-man. Oops.
  3. Barbara is a boss here, as usual. She bravely escapes from the Daleks, helps the rebels out regardless of what that entails, and bowls for Daleks while driving a massive freaking truck, which was awesome. She’s paired with a rebel woman for a lot of this episode and she’s by far the more active and decisive of the two. She even bullshits the Dalek leaders to try to get to the transmitter so she can tell the Robo-Men to rebel, but this doesn’t work. Eventually this plan IS used to win, though!
  4. Ian is also pretty great in this episode. He has come a LONG way, and not only does he use his Action Physicist powers to good effect, evading Daleks and the Slyther, but he ALSO is responsible for the ultimate failure of their plan, because he puts some sticks in the way of their “destroy the core” capsule thingy.
  5. The Tardis. Is mostly under the rubble in this episode, probably because no one has fed her. Why do they keep parking the Tardis in the worst possible places?

THE GUEST STARS

Honestly there are a lot of rebels and most of them aren’t that memorable but at least do have a couple character traits.

Rebels

  • Not Churchill Guy: Is a “smart” rebel and makes bombs to use against the Daleks, but ends up killing himself when he thinks he’d stop Barb and Blondie from escaping. His bombs don’t really work–are they meant to be an analogy for what if we didn’t have the atomic bomb?
  • Blondie: The most prominent female rebel, she has been resisting the Daleks a long time and is kind of worn down from it, but she’s still doing it and she’s still brave and smart.
  • David: The guy Susan stays behind with. He’s brave and seems nice but like… we don’t know him that well. They have a couple good moments together but it’s not enough and he’s not compelling enough to make it work because the actor just doesn’t have the time to do it.
  • There are a couple other rebels that get nice vignettes, like the guy who is just looking for his brother, who finds that he has been turned into a robo-man and then is killed by said robo-man brother. Then there’s a greedy war profiteer black marketer who is killed by the Slyther. And a couple others.

Other Humans

There are two women living in the woods who betray Barb and Blondie to the Daleks and receive food from it. While the show clearly doesn’t approve of this action they aren’t portrayed as negatively as they could have been.

Daleks

  • Clearly my comments about the Daleks from the previous episode went back in time and Terry Nation heard them because this episode really hammers it home: THE DALEKS ARE THE NAZIS. They firebomb London. They have a leader called a Commandant. The Daleks make a Selection from their prisoners to decide who becomes robo-men. They enslave and brainwash people and use them against their fellows, like the sonderkommandos. Some of the imagery looks like it could have been taken directly from the actual Blitz and I think this would have hit home MUCH HARDER with audiences that fresh from World War II and the Nazi bombings they would have experienced or heard their parents talk about.
  • I feel like Nation really asked himself “what would a British resistance have looked like?” and just made that. Everyone has a stiff upper lip, even those who are exhausted by all the fighting and only one guy seems to be genuinely villainous. Even the women who betray Barb and Blondie are mostly just desperate.
  • The Daleks now have air power and can submerse themselves in the river. They are no longer bound to roll only on metal and seem significantly faster too. They also come in multiple colors now, including black and striped, though it’s still black and white so it’s kind of hard to tell what other colors they are.
  • There is now a Dalek leader with a voice slightly different than those of the others. Is this where Trek got the Borg Queen from?

THE SETTING

  1. Well, we’re back in London. The scenes of the group sneaking around London and evading Daleks and robo-men are amazing and wonderful and I love them.
  2. It’s also a decayed London. Some places look pretty decayed, others don’t, it just kind of depends, but overall they did a great job. The “It is forbidden to dump bodies into the river” sign is kind of iconic.

THE PRODUCTION

  1. What were the connections with World War II in this movie?
  2. There was some stock footage in this movie and I wondered if they actually used any real footage from World War II?
  3. Why did Carole Ann Ford leave? What was her career like afterward, and how did she feel about being part of the Who phenomenon?
  4. Why did they write Susan leaving as they did?
  5. How many Daleks did they have for this serial? I can tell there are more but are there more than 4? What color WERE they IRL?
  6. What locations did they shoot at and what was done on set?
  7. Were there toys? What about soap? Dalek soap? Is there Dalek soap?
  8. DALEKMANNNIIIIIIAAAAAA.

DALEK SCORE

This episode drags a bit, and honestly there are too many characters. They should have cut some of the rebels and given more time to David to make Susan’s departure more plausible. Overall, though, it’s pretty well paced and beautifully filmed, especially given the budget they were probably working with, and so I’d say 4/4 Daleks for this one. It’s everything I want from a Doctor Who so even though it sometimes drags a bit things are still HAPPENING during the dragging parts.

Sources Include

Dalek Product Pictures

Sources: What Did People Think About Doctor Who in 1964?

/ Zach / Leave a comment
An interesting summary to start with. This article feels like not only has the reviewer not watched the episode, but the author also seems to think Ian Chesterton is the focal character. https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/A_new_adventure_on_a_strange_planet_begins_today
The news really was pushing at the time that the Voords would be more popular than the Daleks. As you can tell by the fact that you almost never hear about the Voords, they were wrong. They also barely appear in the serial that was their debut, and as yet their only, onscreen appearance. https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/New_TV_monsters_will_rival_the_Daleks , https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/After_the_Daleks_a_new_horror%E2%80%94_VOORDS
Here are some promotional pictures of Carole Ann Ford with a Voord. This monster was pushed quite hard for being just someone in a modified wetsuit. https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/In_the_grip_of_a_Voord! , https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/My_word%E2%80%94it%27s_a_Voord
An interesting background piece on William Hartnell, especially for us nowadays who may not know that he was often typecast as a military actor. The Doctor was very much outside the normal roles that he got, and in my opinion he did it amazingly. https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/The_Man_Who%27s_Who
And so pretty much from the start the legend of Dr. Who causing kids to watch from behind the sofa even hits some newspapers. It may not seem like it with today’s eyes but back in the 1960s this really was frightening but engaging for children. https://wordpress.com/post/daleksarentrobots.com/552
This one is more tangential; however it addresses an important issue then and now — representation in all aspects of any business but particularly women in entertainment. And none of these writers interviewed here seem particularly bothered by their attitude and of course none of the writers are women. https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Why_can%27t_they_write_for_women%3F
A nice picture of the main cast of the first season with Verity Lambert. It’s a sign of how worldwide the show would end up going, to Canada and Australia even then. https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/The_cast_of_BBC-1%27s_Dr._Who
To end on for now, an odd one loosely tied to “The Sensorites” by the Daily Mail. It’s about scientists developing a “thought machine.” I have searched and this is the only record I could find of it; still, it illustrates the show’s influence in that the go-to in 1964 for a telepathy comparison was Dr. Who. https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Scientists_invent_a_thought_machine#tab=Description

Sources: Dalekmania Strikes in 1964 Britain!

/ Zach / Leave a comment
So to start, here we have one of the guest stars of The Daleks, who really did not get that much screen time and many people probably do not remember. She would later get bit roles appearing in some Hammer films, but Wetherell is most well-known a small role in “A Clockwork Orange.” https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/A_Down-to-Earth_pose_for_a_TV_Space_girl, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0923145/
Here’s a nice touch– the BBC donated two of the Daleks to a children’s home so children could, I guess, roll around pretending to be Daleks. It’s great that they didn’t just dispose of them, though the production probably regretted it when they did indeed bring the Daleks back. https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/TV_Daleks_go_to_the_orphans
One of the donated Daleks is shown being played with by some of the children at one of the homes. https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Picture_parade
Here, the BBC publicly started realizing they could market the Daleks. It’s interesting that they come right out and claim that they completely own the design of said monster. https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/If_you_want_to_buy_a_Dalek_try_the_BBC
As you can see, it was no time at all before people started making their own versions of Daleks or Darlek in this case, This one was even useful! Also neat that this article also thinks that Daleks are Robots. https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Robot_to_sell_rag_magazine
A rather rare thing–a picture of Carole Ann Ford with her daughter, paired with a nice story about having her daughter watch the show. https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Guess_Who_..
As is seen here, the public demand was so intense that Verity Lambert agreed to bring the Daleks back. For the first monsters to appear in the show, they made an impressive impact on the British public. https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Coming_Back_–_The_Daleks!