‘THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH’ (WILLIAM HARTNELL’S DOCTOR WHO)

First broadcast: Nov/ Dec 1964
Written by Terry Nation

”The Daleks invade Earth, and begin drilling to the earth's core in Bedford.”
- from the BBC episode guide

Tyranny in the Home Counties

If (as argued here) the first Dalek story took place in a metaphorical post-War Germany and ’The Reign of Terror’ in an occupied France (if ostensibly a different occupation), this time we get the big one – an occupied England! For the first time, the series’ most iconic image comes into use – the sightseeing invader, alien menaces astride London landmarks.

The Daleks on Westminster Bridge (above) was such a neat symbol that despite being a publicity shot not included in the episode itself, it soon became iconic. The second-ever cover for ’Radio Times’ featured a Trafalgar Square variant (below), but the Daleks look less dominant. It was Westminster Bridge which was recycled into a ’Radio Times’ poster for the revival – a poster I have on my wall right now! (Though such juxtapositions have a precursor in The Ministry of Truth dwarfing Big Ben and other London monuments in Kneale and Cartier’s '1984' adaptation back in 1954.)

You may note it doesn’t say anything above about a metaphorical occupied England. This is the point where the metaphor becomes a figleaf. If you can’t guess what they’re on about with this one, go check your head for a Roboman helmet. 'The Daleks' could, and most likely was, written in innocence of its own central conceit. But perhaps people commenting on it put it into the head of Terry Nation, or one of the other creators. For this time the parallels can not be other than conscious.

So the Daleks start doing things solely to live up to them. The Dalek Supreme (a Black Dalek yet!) sends out Lord Haw Haw-style radio broadcasts suggesting the rebels give up. (Telling them “You will be fed and watered. Work is needed from you but the Daleks offer you life.”) Later he decides to destroy London with incendiary bombs. (Despite the fact London’s of little strategic importance to him, and he could have done this anytime.) And just in case it hasn't been hammered home hard enough yet, he even drops the phrase “final solution” into the conversation! You getting it yet? Nude, nudge.

Their ostensible plan is to rip out the Earth’s core, replace it with a motor and use it as a spaceship. (Alas there never was a sequel where they forget where they parked it, called ’Dude, Where’s My Planet?’) Older viewers, younger viewers, the family dog and quite possibly the vase of flowers on top of the TV can all spot that this plan is nonsensical. For one thing, they already have spaceships. That’s how they got here in the first place.

But of course they’re digging in Bedfordshire not because it’s any closer to the centre of the earth, but because of the images it conjures of the Home Counties being despoiled. (I come from Bedfordshire and can confirm, yes, these days much of it has been dug up for mining. Half of my home turf literally isn't turf any more.)

Beyond the Daleks, the landscape is stuffed with soon-familiar furniture – desperate but determined rebels, black marketeers, quislings and traitors… all marinated in an overall atmosphere of distrust, desperation and self-sacrifice. Resistance, of course, is eventually proven to not be futile. Yet the brutal fact of occupation forces characters into acting as though it is. Contrast Dortmun’s self-sacrifice with the women who betray Barbara and Jenny by reasoning they’d “have been captured anyway.”

With all these endless reappearances of Nazi stand-ins, it’s interesting to note that when Bryan Hayles suggested a Nazi-era story the very concept was declared off-limits as “too sensitive” (see ‘The Nazis’. Was the very concept of a Nazi-occupied England so scary, so at odds with our most fundamental self-image as stalwart resistors and plucky islanders, it could only be approached circuitously?

Perhaps partly, but the same year ITV produced ’The Other Man’, an alternate-history where that very thing happened. More likely, ’Doctor Who’s’ status as ‘light entertainment’ (not ‘serious drama’) left it open to charges of trivialising such events, resulting in more careful treading. But this may be one of those cases where the censorship stimulated creativity, and the figleaf proved more interesting than the predictable item lying flaccidly beneath it. However, the existence of both suggests how war-obsessed British society still was in the supposedly modish Sixties.

Digging For Dalek Victory

Between this and the story being set not in a fixed past or even present but the future (albeit a future which looks suspiciously like the mid-Sixties but on a smaller budget), the interventionist debate that recurred throughout the first series is finally settled. When Susan suggests to her new beau David they could escape back to the Tardis, he firmly responds that this is his home and he must stay and fight. Susan not only agrees but elects to stay with him at the story’s end.

True, this argument might have had more bite had it been less hypothetical, for story conventions still insist the Tardis be buried under a staged fall of some less-than-substantial-looking rubble. But it still feels like a turning point.

It's a bit like the way the house style of Marvel comics didn't actually emulate their star artist Jack Kirby, but swiped from for the much more copyable John Buscema. Through springing the confines of their home city and actually invading somewhere, the Daleks as we know them arrive. All sequels stem from here, more than from their first outing.

It even provides evidence for the daft-yet-endearing notion propounded in the Trotskyist newspaper 'Socialist Worker' that 'Doctor Who' is Maoist! You see, everyone and everything in it falls neatly into the category Oppressor, Peasantry or Vanguard. The Daleks, you may have guessed, are the Oppressors.

The Tardis crew are the Vanguard, arriving out of nowhere to cajole the peasantry into revolt. (Perhaps we should start calling them the Gang of Four?) Check out for example their hijacking of the Daleks’ tannoy to order the Robomen to turn on their masters, with Barbara’s less-than-brilliant impersonation of a Dalek voice. (As the Robomen are never cured but merely counter-ordered, you can’t help but wonder what happens to them after it’s all over.)

But of course their cookie-cutter thinking is flawed, and most of all in their last case. True enough, with the previous Dalek story I commented “The opposition of bad, city-based overlords to noble simple peasants (the Thals are farmers) will recur again and again.”

As already mentioned, the Daleks’ decision to mine the English soil is as indicative of their evil as any of their exterminating. Turning the Earth into a giant spaceship scores on the symbolism chart. The most supremely organic thing on Earth... well that probably is the Earth, and here it's reduced to a machine. Removing its core is to remove its heart.

The film spin-off underlines this still further, introducing a subplot where the Daleks are defeated by magnetism “from Mother Earth herself.” Echoing a line from Nation’s original script: “The Earth rebelled and destroyed the invader.” (NB I am not going to keep pointing out when things don't make sense. Even the internet is not infinite.)

We’re told at one point the neo-Marxist axiom “man to them is just a work machine”, a line given its literalisation in the Robomen. It’s reminiscent of Chaplin’s speech at the end of ’The Great Dictator’ (1940): “Don’t give yourselves to thes unnatural men! Machine men! With machine minds! And machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!” (An anti-fascist film, this also cycles back to our first point.)

And here the resistance, though based in London, keep staking their claim to country life. David, for example, mentions his family has “strong connections” with the land. (A line stated more strongly in the shooting script: “I’m going to farm. It’s the land that matters, isn’t it? Susan, the world’s saturated itself with science.”)

Yet these rebels are no grubby-mitted peasants, in fact they seem as selective a group as any squash club! (To the point where 'The Dalek Takeover of the Home Counties' might have been a more apposite title.) In the DVD documentary, Nicholas Smith comments he played revolt leader Wells as a “Somerset Yeoman”.

What we’re seeing is suburban ambiguity, the peculiarly English habit of taking aristocratic signifiers and handing them to the middle classes, perhaps best epitomised by the popular phrase “an Englishman’s home is his castle”. Essentially, it’s maintaining the association of identity with land. As Owen Hatherley points out: “The British were the first people to have no contact with the 'soil', were mainly urban by the mid-19th century, and the imaginary return to Arcadia can only be seen in this context: as a myth, something longed for because it no longer exists.”

The Daleks’ evil is to mechanise and industrialise the land. And to do it by taking these decent middle class chaps and reducing them into common labourers, digging their mine. (Their decision to not use any of their Dalek technology, but instead insist everyone has to shovel their way down to the Earth’s core, may simply be down to sheer malevolence. Alternately, it may just not make any sense.)

Yet at the same time it’s significant that suburban ambiguity knows itself well enough to remain ambiguous. It’s how suburbanites wanted to see themselves, not how they wanted to be. So David and Susan’s future life is set in is post-credits happy-ever-after land. Another of David’s comments even suggests such a plan is folly. He reveals the Dalek invasion had started with germ warfare, which “had split the world into tiny little communities, too far apart to combine and fight, and too small individually to stand any chance against invasion.” Maybe there’s things to be said for science and civilisation.

And suburban ambiguity has another aspect – like aristocrats, they defend their land, even if the warrior streak is less obvious in their case. Particularly in the earlier London-set episodes, the English resistance are reminiscent of many wartime movies such as the 1942 Ealing classic ’Went The Day Well'. Both somewhat gleefully juxtapose good manners with the ruthlessness borne of the will to survive – ’Debrett’s Guide to Etiquette’ in one hand, gutting knife in the other.

However it’s interesting to note just how shell-shocked and battle-hardened the underground have become, with love interest David perhaps the only exception. The character Jenny in particular is presented as a kind of anti-Barbara, hiding behind a wall of callousness. (I did wonder if the absurd balaclava she kept sporting was some kind of objective correlative for this, but apparently it was for the scenes where her hair hadn’t been dyed the right colour!) There’s the now-famous sign ‘It Is Forbidden To Dump Bodies In the River’. In this way they’re in keeping with the previous Daleks story, unafraid to turn teatime entertainment quite dark.

However, ’Socialist Worker’s typically one-note theory does have a stopped-clock moment of truth to it! The point of the Barbara/Jenny juxtaposition is to establish the Tardis crew’s ‘Vanguard’ role, not just galvanizing the resistance but re-teaching them human values. There’s a key scene where, locked in the Dalek saucer, the other prisoner insists there’s no hope of escape while the Doctor and Ian immediately focus on how they’re going to get out. Similarly, though the rebel Dortmun sacrifices his life to make his anti-Dalek bombs, they never actually work – they put his notes to use, but for a tangential purpose.

Everything Would Ever Be the Same Again

Though its ’The Daleks’ which tends to win fan votes, this story proved the ratings-buster and (cunningly timed for Christmas) unleashed the wave of Dalek merchandise - as John Peel notes, “Dalekmania has begun!” Which seems planned from the get-go.

The stroke of the pen that liberates them from their metal floors also pushes them away from their identity, and starts them off on their long slide into generic evil-ness. They were never sympathetic figures but they were, in the strict sense of the word, pathetic - victims of their own folly. Their voices, surely as big signifiers of their identity as their design, always seemed pitched between bragging and hysteria.

No longer paranoiacally reacting to non-existent threats, here they are made into pure-and-simple aggressors. Their motivation for attacking the Earth, to use it as a means to attack more places, is circular. Essentially allowing them to behave even more like themselves than they were already.

This loop of logic leads to a paradox. Never innately scary, they also look more blatantly ridiculous when taken outside their City. While in those iconic London scenes they do come across as quaintly sinister, in some of the later mine-location stuff they look laughable. This is particularly true of the slaves’ uprising, with one hilarious shot of them carrying a pepperpot aloft as if he’s just scored a goal! The show itself cannot entirely ignore this, there's some deliberately comic moments - such as when one interrogates a tailor’s dummy. (Let's watch out for those...)

And this process of creating antagonists with special and unique features, then rapidly ditching those features in order to make them reusable and easily insertable guest stars, this will become so common in this show we’ll need a name for it. So, after ‘the banality of evil, let’s call it ’the banalisation of monsters’. And notably this story makes monsters recyclable just as it determines that cast members are replaceable (more of which anon), further underlining where this is going. Nevertheless…

Significantly there’s no mention of the tentacled things inhabiting them; even when the Dalek casings get smashed up they look suspiciously empty. However, they are given personalities and we’re even given moments where we see events through their eye pieces. If the warning signs are already detectable, they have not yet degenerated into mere killing machines.

The importance of the Daleks invading somewhere, rather than just skulking in their city, is thrown up in the title. Which may sound like a generic title standing for a rather basic idea. Well the wheel was a basic idea too, yet proved pretty handy in the business of moving stuff along. If this is the template for future Dalek stories – perhaps even for ’Who’ stories in general – that may suggest a binding formula has already come crushing in.

But that's in the long run. For now, it all seems like something new. This sequel improves upon the original in about every formal way, utilizing more effective cross-cutting for a far better-paced viewing experience. (Some see the first, London-based half of the storyline as superior, before it moves on to mining in Bedfordshire. True, almost all the iconic images come from the first part. Also true, the more unintentionally comic moments come more from the second part, such as the Slyther. But the change of location keeps things moving, in contrast to its somewhat languorous predecessor.)

So Long Susan

The one point the fans do commend is the coda, in saying farewell to Susan it leaves not a dry eye in the house. In fact, this scene should be required viewing for every lazy journo who has claimed the revival introduced an emotional dimension to the show. It’s true that Susan growing up and getting hitched is seen more as an incident in the Doctor’s life than in hers. In fact his locking her out of the Tardis is like an extreme form of giving away the bride, of telling the child to grow up. Alas, she couldn’t go out the way she came in. But then as an incident in the Doctor’s life the impact is considerable.

You can even find in it a kind of fuzzy character arc for the Doctor. He all but kidnaps Ian and Barbara (‘Unearthly Child’),endangers everyone through reckless curiosity (‘The Daleks’) and even threatens to throw them out into space! (‘Edge of Destruction’) He’s an uninvolved wanderer, interested only in his researches and experiments, with virtual contempt for the lower life forms he passes through.

The only thing he shows any kindness for is the one being who is of his kind – his grand-daughter. His motivation to steal away Ian and Barbara comes precisely when Susan threatens to leave with them. But here he does precisely the reverse, locking her out of the Tardis, and for selfless reasons - to allow her to take up her own life. It's almost certainly unplanned. But it’s there.

Despite skipping an episode, Hartnell seems on something of a roll here. He even fits in what must be his most iconic moment, his character’s signature. As a Dalek glides menacingly into the room, all others scatter for cover. Only he remains, thumbs hooked defiantly in his waistcoat, looking down with schoolteacherish disdain.

Officially speaking, the weaker ’Reign of Terror’ ended the first season. But this was the last to be made in the first production block and with the first ever crew departure – who’s not even a human foundling but the Doctor’s own grand-daughter - feels like the closer. (Anyway, it was listed as such in the ’Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special', so I’ve imagined it as such since 1973!) Much of the working-out and trial-by-error has been done, with the title character all-but transformed and his arch-enemies redesigned for repeat action...

Further reading! Jonathan Morris’ Black Archive book ’The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ runs through six versions of the script (including the spin-off movie and novelisation), diligently pointing out changes. You can spot easily enough the points above where I’m indebted to him.

Coming soon! “Woe is me, for I have lost my Grand-daughter!” “Don't worry, old timer, we'll get you another one.”

A repeated plea! When I first started this series, I asked that if people liked what I was writing they tell someone else, as that was my only way of spreading the word. Some kind souls did this and the stats shot up to levels others might think of as “not too bad”. Alas ‘The Aztecs' saw a plummet, its readership not half of the highest-ranking entry. (‘Keys of Marinus’, oddly enough.) This was particularly tough to take, as ‘The Aztecs’ was the one I was convinced would show the world how good I was at this!

I don’t expect fame, fortune and Patreon backers, and that seems just as well. But if you like what I write please don’t keep it to yourself. More readers will encourage more writing.