What's Wrong With... The Evil of the Daleks

 

There are many who would argue that there is nothing wrong with The Evil of the Daleks. It is regarded as the great lost masterpiece of 1960's Doctor Who, and everyone would love to see it animated if it isn't likely to ever be found intact.

I'm on record as disagreeing with this opinion, for I think it suffers terribly from padding in the middle episodes. There are four characters in this story who simply have no role to play in it - Toby, Arthur, Mollie and Ruth. I just don't see the point of their inclusion.

If anything, their presence adds to some confusion. The Daleks need Jamie for their experiment. The Daleks have Arthur under their mental control. Why then does Arthur hire Toby to kidnap Jamie - putting the experiment in jeopardy? If it is because his mental conditioning is failing, and he's actually trying to save Jamie, then this isn't made clear.

Arthur never eats or drinks - indeed he cannot, for we see him attempt to take a sip of wine and fail. Why? What possible purpose do the Daleks have for stopping him eating and drinking? And why is he slightly magnetic (other than because this is a David Whitaker script, and we all know how good he is on science).

You could argue that Episode One is also padding, as the Doctor and Jamie simply travel all over London following clues which will finally get them into the story. Again, we are presented with a number of characters they encounter who muddy the waters a little, but are irrelevant to the main plot.

The Doctor and Jamie don't reach the main plot until two thirds of the way through Episode Two.

The experiment Jamie is forced to take part in involves the rescue of Victoria Waterfield. The desired outcome of this experiment really depends on him succeeding, otherwise the Daleks don't get the data they're after. Why then make his task so potentially lethal? As well as numerous deadly booby-traps, Maxtible also throws in his Turkish manservant Kemel to try to kill him. It's surely possible to have a complex experiment that will deliver what you want, but that isn't as likely to kill your test subject before they can complete it.

What the Daleks are after is the "Human Factor" - the thing that means humans are continually beating them. Once they get it, they have it transplanted into three test Daleks. It later turns out that they don't want the Human Factor at all, but to reverse engineer this and find the "Dalek Factor". So why introduce the Human Factor into those three test Daleks if you have no use for it? They plan to blow up Maxtible's house when it's time to leave, so why take the three with them when they go - into the heart of their city? And once back, they don't properly supervise these potentially disruptive Daleks. They're left to wander about.

On a similar point, why do the Daleks take Kemel with them, but leave the Doctor behind? Their plan is actually to have the Doctor spread the Dalek Factor throughout Earth's history using the TARDIS, after they've converted him. Bit difficult, if you've left him to be blown to bits.

Then again, if the Daleks already have time travel technology, why do they need the TARDIS to spread their Factor?

And why do Daleks need to know what their own Factor is anyway? Surely they know what they do and why they do it. They never shut up about being the supreme beings in the universe. They could simply have bottled it on their own back on Skaro.

We know the house that was used as location for the filming of this story, and it does get shown on screen. The interior simply doesn't fit with the exterior. The Daleks would need to have taken over virtually the whole building to hide Victoria (without Ruth knowing about it) and use for their experiment.

Why does Maxtible have a portrait of Waterfield's dead wife on prominent display in his living room? Aspects of their relationship are never properly explained.

The TARDIS ends up outside the city at the conclusion. Maxtible claims that he moved it there, when he's pretending to be helping the Doctor. If he was pretending to be helpful, why not move it closer to where the Doctor was imprisoned? It's as if Whitaker simply needed a reason for the ship to be outside the city when it gets destroyed.

Marius Goring has a few stumbles on his lines - including calling Waterfield "Whitefield", and he seems to think that the Daleks come from someplace called Skarov.

In the same way that fans were terribly disappointed with some of the effects in Tomb of the Cybermen when it was rediscovered, I strongly suspect that there would be similar disappointments at the use of many pointy-topped toy Daleks in the epic conclusion to this story, were Episode Seven ever to resurface.

Waterfield's shop in 1966 sells "Genuine Victorian Antiques". Is this to differentiate it from the shop next door proudly advertising "Fake Victorian Antiques"?

Ten Bad Target Book Covers

 

I'm pleased to report that my internet appears to be back up and running. Before I get back into the swing of the regular run of blog posts I thought I'd run this piece - prompted by the most recent issue of DWM. This edition has a Target Books emphasis, and I was most taken with the free poster. On one side are all the original covers for all the books, whilst the reverse has the same books but with later reprint covers. Naturally I've gone for the first side to grace my wall, with all the classic Chris Achilleos covers from the 1970's.

I've been looking at it a lot over the last few days, as well as dipping into my "The Target Book", and have identified some firm favourites - and some that I don't think are anywhere near as impressive, for one reason or another. In story order, these are my ten least favourite first edition covers. (I could have filled this piece with the first batch of reprints, which are uniformly bad, but decided to stick with just the first editions). By all means, do let me know if you disagree. You might love some of these, or have others you hate more.

No.1: Doctor Who And An Unearthly Child.

Yes - a Police Box, standing in a junkyard, is where it all began. However, this just isn't representative of the story as a whole. The junkyard scene takes up only part of the first half of the first episode. The sequences on screen were set at night, and look atmospheric, yet this image shows the TARDIS in broad daylight. I just find it rather dull - and I always hate banners across the image.

No.2: Doctor Who And The Keys Of Marinus.

This is another deadly dull image, which has nothing to do with the story itself. The TARDIS is never seen in space. Some later novelisations which were full of characters and locations elected to represent several of them on their covers - e.g. The Chase or Mission to the Unknown (The Daleks' Masterplan Vol 1). This is a globe trotting adventure, with lots of creatures and characters - Voord, Morpho, Ice Soldiers etc. - yet none of this appears. It's just a generic Doctor Who book cover.

No.3: Doctor Who - The Aztecs.

The artist here just hasn't bothered looking at any of the photographic publicity material from this story. If the last cover was a generic Doctor Who one, then this is a generic Aztecs one. Presumably the fierce looking gentleman with the dagger is meant to be Tlotoxl, but looks nothing like him. Sticking a TARDIS in the corner just isn't good enough.

No.4: Doctor Who - The Romans.

What lets this one down for me is the representation of the Emperor Nero. Like the previous cover, the artist has ignored the publicity images of Derek Francis. That's it for this one.

No.5: Doctor Who - The Space Museum.

A perfectly good image of William Hartnell, but they stick a couple of generic spaceships beside him, then include a couple of Daleks - suggesting something which this story is not. It isn't a Dalek story. There's an empty casing which the Doctor hides in, and one turns up at the very end as a cliff-hanger into the following story, but I think it's misleading to feature them on this cover.

No.6: Doctor Who - The Mind Robber.

I hate the pink background, but more than that I hate the fact that they've once again ignored images from the story itself. The Gorgon looks nothing like the one which featured in the story (which was actually quite creepy), and the other characters are simply generic versions of things which appeared in the story.

No.7: Doctor Who And The Androids Of Tara.

The problem with this one is the dreadful likenesses of both Tom Baker and Mary Tamm. It's also rather boring. "The Target Book" has a detailed drawing of Tom which was prepared for this cover, which is really very good, but it just didn't translate into the final painted image.

No.8: Doctor Who And The Destiny Of The Daleks.

It's just bland, and the Daleks are bit cartoon-y. Stick Tom Baker on the cover with a couple of Daleks and anyone will buy it. I suspect this cover was painted before the story had even been made. Apparently Graham Williams hated this as well - so I'm in good company.

No.9: Doctor Who And The State of Decay.

A dark, gloomy, gothic horror story - so why on Earth did they choose bright blue and neon pink as a colour scheme for this cover? Had they just extended that nocturnal sky across the whole cover, and ditched the pink logo, then this would have avoided this list.

No.10: Doctor Who And The Visitation.

This one is actually representative of the whole run of early Peter Davison novelisations where they dispensed with cover artists, and stuck rather bland publicity photos on the covers instead. Everyone mentions the cover for Earthshock - which doesn't have any Cybermen on it (and shows the Doctor brandishing a gun). I almost went for that one, but just think about this cover for a moment. There's a brand new, great looking, reptilian alien, an ornate robot, a historical setting, and the Great Fire of London in this story - and what do we get? A smiling Doctor standing outside the TARDIS.

Actually, a painting was submitted for this book, but Davison and his agent turned it down as they didn't think much of the likeness.

And finally, a dishonourable mention...

Not a first edition cover, but you just have to include this in any list of bad covers. Is that honestly supposed to be Colin Baker???

Inspirations - Ghost Light

 

One of Ghost Light's principal inspirations was the day job of its author, Marc Platt. He had spent some time with the BBC helping to catalogue its radio archive. You would expect the work to have reduced as the catalogue progressed, but instead it actually grew into a bigger and more complex task as the categories were refined. This feeds into the finished story as Light gets frustrated by the constant changes which mess up his catalogue of life-forms on Earth.

Platt had no professional writing experience but had submitted a story called "Lungbarrow" to the Doctor Who production office. This involved the Doctor going back to Gallifrey, to visit his ancestral home. It was vetoed by JNT, as it gave too much away about the Doctor's origins. Lungbarrow was the name of the Doctor's house, and this was one element which Platt kept for Ghost Light - the setting of a big old house full of bizarre characters. Inspector McKenzie's suspended animation derives from a character in "Lungbarrow" who had been trapped into a transmat for 300 years.

One of the inspirations for "Lungbarrow" was the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake, another ancient household full of odd characters and even odder incident - so you can argue that this another inspiration for Ghost Light.

Instead of a story exploring the Doctor's origins, Platt ended up writing a story about Ace's origins, as it delivers a great deal of information about her life before she encountered the Doctor.

He was a great fan of all things Victorian / Edwardian, which prompted the historical setting, and the dialogue references many Victorian books. One such would be the notion that Ace is like Lewis Carroll's Alice, going down the rabbit hole into a strange world.

The Doctor mentions Bandersnatches and Slithy Toves - which also come from Carroll (the 1871 poem Jabberwocky). 

The housekeeper of Gabriel Chase is Mrs Grose. This was the same name as the housekeeper in Henry James' supernatural classic The Turn of the Screw (1898). Mrs Pritchard seems to be modelled upon Mrs Danvers, from Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Written outside Platt's favourite historical era, but it is very much a 1930's version of a Victorian Gothic novel.

Josiah Smith calls himself "a man of property", which comes from Galsworthy. The Man of Property is one of the books in The Forsyte Saga.

Big game hunter Redvers Fenn-Cooper gets his surname from James Fenimore Cooper, author of Last of the Mohicans (1826).

Control's desire to become a "ladylike" obviously derives from George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (1913).

The clergyman who visits Smith is the Rev. Ernest Matthews. This might be a reference to Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (Ghost Light has a reference to Reading Gaol), but is more likely to come from Platt's own relations (Ernest is his dad's name).

The Rev Matthews brings us to the other big inspiration - Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution, and its Creationist opponents. The story could be seen as being about the conflict between science and religion, or as the conflict between change and conservatism / technological advance and tradition.

There's a 1960 movie with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March called Inherit The Wind, which is based on the infamous 1925 "Monkey Trial". Conservative town leaders take a school teacher to court for advocating Darwinism. The film was seen at the time as an attack on McCarthyism.

The costume design for Light was based both on a William Blake angel, and an insect with a wing case. There was supposed to be third husk creature in the cellar - with a fish-like head. Smith would therefore have evolved through the four main fauna groups - insect, reptile, fish and mammal.

A couple of more recent references for Ghost Light include the draft version of The Evil of the Daleks, in which the Doctor would have collected a Neanderthal named Og from prehistoric times in order to help identify the Human Factor for the Daleks - bringing him to a big old Victorian mansion. 

The other is the Doctor's query "Who was it said Earthmen never invite their ancestors round for dinner?". This comes from Douglas Adams and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Some people have also seen parallels with The Rocky Horror Show - big old spooky house; strange inhabitants (who turn out to be alien); the main character in the house seeking a form of perfection and being overthrown by his servants at the end; and one of the characters being served up for dinner. The house takes off and flies into space at the end.

Next time: more character development for Ace. And Bram Stoker's Dracula...

IT Update 2

As you may have noticed I was able to post normally yesterday. I got myself one of those small mobile wi-fi gizmos as an interim measure, while I wait for the new ISP to get set up.

Problem is, the gizmo isn't terribly reliable. Have had it a week and last night was the first time I got more than two or three minutes of service, so please expect more shorter text-only posts until I'm properly set up with fully operational internet access (end of next week, fingers crossed).

Peter Craze (1946 - 2020)

The latest issue of DWM has reported that Peter Craze has passed away. It was actually on 30th December, 2020, but most of us only learned of it at the end of last week.

He appeared in Doctor Who on three occasions. The first was as Dako, a young Xeron rebel in The Space Museum, where he featured alongside the late Jeremy Bulloch - his friend and contemporary at drama school.

His next appearance was a brief one - as the captured French soldier Du Pont in The War Games.

His final role was a more substantial one - that of the Customs Officer Costa in Nightmare of Eden.

His other connection with the worlds of Doctor Who was, of course, the fact that he was the younger brother of companion actor Michael Craze, who played Ben Jackson between The War Machines (1966) and The Faceless Ones (1967).

What's Wrong With... The Faceless Ones

The aliens in this are known as the Chameleons, because they take over other people's identities and can therefore blend in with the humans around them. Did they take over an airline that was already called "Chameleon Airlines", or did they name the setup themselves? If the latter, isn't it sort of drawing attention to yourselves?

A problem with all aliens who come to Earth to get what they want: how many more suitable planets did they fly by to get here. The Chameleons want humanoids to copy. Are there no humanoid races less technologically advanced, and therefore less of a threat, they could have picked on instead?

Just how did they manage to set up the airline? These things take a huge amount of time and capital, with all manner of international agreements if they're flying beyond the UK. Lots of licences and other paperwork involved. Just how long did they spend setting this up?

Why has no-one noticed before now that their flights are only full one way, and are always empty on return journeys?

If this has been going on for a while, how come Samantha Briggs seems to be the only person to have raised a missing person's report. Most of these holidays would be for a fortnight at best, which suggests that the aliens can't have been operating long, yet they have thousands of young people already swapped with - despite only ever operating those one way flights.

Is hiding your original bodies in a car park really a sensible thing to do, especially when tampering with them can kill you? Surely people using that car park day in, day out, would have noticed the same people snoozing in the vehicles. 

All sorts of things happen with Meadows in Air Traffic Control, yet he seems to be able to just return to his station as if nothing has happened.

The James Bond style "kill your enemies in an overly complicated manner without bothering to stay to make sure nothing goes wrong" bit has to be mentioned, as there's a glaring example of it here with Spencer and the laser weapon.

Victor Winding, who plays Spencer, on his first entry into the hidden office, takes the door handle away with him - and carries on acting regardless. What a star!

There's a security alert out for someone in a kilt. Just how many Scotsmen are passing through Gatwick this week, for Jamie not to be picked up straight away?

Ben and Polly discover that it is the same date as when they first walked into the TARDIS back in Fitzroy Square. That means that the whole War Machine incident has been occurring at the same time as this - yet there's no mention of it. WOTAN thought Heathrow would make a good base for setting up one of the Machines, so surely it would also have selected Gatwick. Very easy to get your raw materials shipped in, and lots of outbuildings to work in unnoticed. After all, if a bunch of aliens can run an airline for several weeks, killing policemen along the way, without anyone local noticing, then Gatwick would be ideal for a few day's construction on a War Machine.

For their final story it's sad that Anneke Wills and Michael Craze have such little involvement, disappearing after the first couple of episodes before a tacked on filmed farewell at the conclusion. Both were contracted up to the second episode of the following story, but were let go early (though paid up to when they should have left).

IT Update

Am moving to a new ISP, but it won't be set up until 18th / 19th February. There will be a couple of text-only What's Wrong With...'s, and a couple of Inspirations before then, hopefully.