One of the stipulations of the original Doctor Who program was that there were to be no bug-eyed monsters. The show was initially developed to introduce children to time history through the time-travel conceit. Yet in the 1963 series, the shows second, the Daleks were introduced, intended as an allegory of the Nazis, and were a huge hit. Sir David Attenborough, was at the BBC at the time and reminisces in a recent Radio Times interview: Ive always enjoyed Doctor Who from a technical point of view. I sat in on a lot of early discussions during which we cooked up the programme under the aegis of Sydney Newman, who was the BBC head of drama. I remember he specified he didnt want monsters in it but the first producer, Verity Lambert, went against that and introduced the Daleks. Sydney was livid with her to start with but Verity, of course, was right. Indeed she was. The Daleks were a huge and immediate hit, and they are now completely absorbed into British culture. They appeared on a 1999 postage stamp, and a 2008 survey demonstrated that nine out of ten British schoolchildren could identify a Dalek (as a Dalek, presumably, and not a pepper-shaker).
Posted on: Sat, 17 May 2014 01:39:10 +0000
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