Why Doctor Who needs the Daleks
12 million people watch BBC’s “Doctor Who” if the Daleks are in it, only 7-8 million if they’re not. These robots first appeared in December 1963. Children found it reassuringly easy to draw Daleks and to imitate their throaty, querulous voices.
Like “Thunderbirds”, “Doctor Who” is shown at weekends to entertain all ages from 14 upwards. It has to recognise, though, that millions of very young children do watch – often wide-eyed from behind their chairs. So it aims at good, clean, adventurous, enjoyable fear.
Recently William Hartnell retired from the name part, giving way to a younger actor, Patrick Troughton. There are to be other changes. the new producer, Innes Lloyd, is conscious of the weakness of non-Dalek stories – when his time-machine travels back into the past. He wants these stories to have “less obvious history, more guts”.
This is an extract from Children’s TV: Watching with Mother by Mavis and Geoffrey Nicholson, a feature published in the Observer magazine on 18 December 1966.
NB: The master tapes of all six episodes of The Power of the Daleks, the third serial of the fourth season of Doctor Who, which was first broadcast from 5 November to 10 December 1966, were erased in the late 1960s. Jane Bown’s photographs are one of the few visual records that survive.
