Things I've Learnt from Watching My Favourite Doctor Who Stories : 53 - The Dalek Invasion of Earth

53: The Dalek Invasion of Earth

It's Better to be Ambitious than Play Safe! 

Classic Doctor Who was never a big budget show. As Steven Moffat once said, the reason Doctor Who looked cheap is because it was cheap! £2,500 per episode for a half hour drama series works out at approximately £65k in today's money. That's probably not enough to cover the catering budget on any tv show nowadays. 

But often where Doctor Who tried to exceed the limitations of the budget is when you got the series at its best. The first season looks good there are no obvious cheap filler episodes that you get later on in the series (hello Time Flight!) save for The Edge of Destruction which was made as an emergency stopgap between the two epics of the season. Of course, one of those epics we sadly can't see so it could look as cheap as chips but from the telesnaps it doesn't. 

Which leads me to the Dalek Invasion of Earth, Doctor Who's first proper blockbuster. Verity Lambert was not caught short with the success of the Daleks (despite giving two of the props away to Barbados) and quickly commissioned a sequel  from Terry Nation. 

Nation taps into War of the Worlds territory with the idea of Daleks on Earth. And it is grim! No other Dalek story has this level of grimy grimness, not even Genesis. This is probably Nation's best script, or at least out of those that weren't edited / influenced by Robert Holmes! 

The Doctor and the companions are quickly split in the first episode, which is standard for a Terry Nation story but as it's early days, it seems less predicatable and I'm fact, we don't see all four regulars together until the closing scenes of the last episode, Flashpoint. But by that last episode, the main characters look as dirty and dishevelled as they did at the end of The Firemaker. 

As the TARDIS arrives midway through the invasion, there's a sense of foreboding in the first episode which is well realised by director Richard Martin. General consensus is that Martin isn't a very good director in the studio, not coping with the small environs of Riverside Studios. 

The battle in episode two does seem clumsy and confused but battles can be confused and there's a tension to these scenes and the aftermath where Susan and David listen to a man screaming about his dead family as he's chased and then exterminated is chilling and uncomfortably adult. The later scene where Larry is trying to reason with his robotised brother is similarly bleak. It helps that these people  are called Larry, David, Jenny etc and not Zog, Zeg or Sharalander. They're real people, struggling to survive. 

The performances are as strong as the writing. Bernard Kay, always a dependable actor is believable as Tyler, Peter Fraser is also good as David Campbell; his romance with Susan is one of the more credible in the series history and his deference to the Doctor's authority is a nice touch and change to the usual Nation stock hotheaded male characters. But my favourite character is Jenny, played with blunt pessimism by Ann Davies (wife of Richard Briers) She's a believable character, not like the winsome female characters of Nation's Pertwee Dalek stories. 

But the standout scene is of course the departure of Susan; tenderly written and performed, lacking the over-wrought sentimentality of New Who. Hartnell in his speech particularly conveys the Doctor's sadness tenderly, giving him a sensitivity not seen since the Aztecs. 

The Dalek Invasion of Earth isn't perfect, the budget can't contain the ambition and some sequences don't work. The Slither is terrible and the Dalek voices sound like Henry Crun from the Goon Show; "We are the Masters of Earth, Min!" 

But there's ambition here, a concerted effort to push the boundaries of the series and build on the success of Season One. It's not for nothing that this story has been voted the best Hartnell story. A cynic could argue that's only because we can see three quarters of the Daleks Master Plan, but this is definitely worth the top spot! 

Next Time : You should take more water with that is terrible advice!