The Daleks v. The Christmas Invasion
For my latest post the Randomiser brought me to the dead planet of Skaro, for the Doctor’s first encounter with The Daleks over the winter of 1963-64, and back to London’s Powell Estate for the first adventure of the Tenth Doctor, The Christmas Invasion, first broadcast 42 years after The Daleks on 25 December 2005.
I’ve struggled to get down to writing this one. In fact, I’ve really procrastinated – it’s more than a couple of weeks now since I finished watching the two stories, and much as I enjoyed both of them I’ve found it hard to get my head around how to write about them. The Daleks and The Christmas Invasion are two of the most important televised stories in Doctor Who’s history. I think I’m worried about doing neither of them justice and also that there has probably been so much already written about them that I’m unlikely to produce anything original or interesting; additionally there is a lot that I feel about both of them that I might struggle to find the words for. But the blog ends if I can’t deal with these obstacles so there’s nothing for it but to just give it a go …
The Daleks
Possibly through overfamiliarity, I had forgotten how good this story is. As I’ll talk about a bit further on, the account of Doctor Who’s first exciting adventure with the Daleks has been told and re-told in a number of different forms now: on TV, film and in books. Most fans of the show probably know how the story goes, and can easily recall the most famous scenes and sequences – the TARDIS landing in a petrified forest, the Doctor and the fluid link, the Daleks in their city, Susan going back to the TARDIS alone to get the medicines, the beautiful Thals, the trek through the swamp and the mountains, and the plucky Earth people teaching the Thals a thing or two about how the Daleks don’t like it up ‘em. Familiarity can breed contempt, in this case perhaps because we reduce the story down to those stand-out memories, and it becomes simpler and thinner, less interesting.
But for the purposes of this blog I’ve been rewatching stories with a critical eye – more so than when I’m just revisiting for a hit of nostalgia – and while in some cases this can make a story look a bit more shonky, it can also further elevate the genuine classics. I was surprised, and pleased to find this true of The Daleks. It is simple and naïve, of course – it’s a television programme for family viewing from the early 1960s – but it’s put together with imagination and conviction, all the more surprising given the apparent lack of institutional support afforded to Verity Lambert at this crucial point in the show’s early development. Great credit should also go to directors Christopher Barry and Richard Martin, writer Terry Nation, designer Raymond Cusick, composer Tristram Cary, the cast, and pretty much everyone involved in this particular production. I tried to imagine what it must have seemed like for those watching the very first broadcasts on their little tellies at Saturday teatimes between 21 December 1963 and 1 February 1964, and think it must have seemed incredibly gripping. I can see why it became the talk of the schools and the streets; the craze of ‘Dalekmania’ and Doctor Who’s taking root in the landscape of Britain’s popular culture both become a little more understandable.
The famous cliffhanger at the end of the first episode is rightly celebrated. Barbara being menaced by a mysterious metal arm is the climax to an almost unbearable build-up of claustrophobic tension as she becomes lost and trapped in the depths of this strange alien city. The corridors are just too small, causing Barbara to stoop as she tries to find her way out. At one point she places her hand over the camera; this, the strange echoing background noise, and her terrified shadow behind the door screen that closes on her all contribute to the disturbing effect of her dilemma.
But after their initial appearance, what makes this story so good isn’t the Daleks, in my opinion. They’re the obvious takeaway for the children, easy and fun to replicate in the playground with grating voices and arms outstretched. But it’s the quality of the adventure that makes them look good. Episode one is packed with mystery and menace, and episode two is full of incredible drama and peril and menace, the travellers’ plight worsening as they succumb to the effects of radiation poisoning. When Susan makes her journey back to the TARDIS through the stormy forest, terrified by the presence of a strange, cloaked figure, the camera is directed at Carole Ann Ford’s face rather than on her surroundings, which heightens the sense that we are sharing the character’s fear and paranoia.
The nervy but compelling drama continues across the seven episodes. Ian pretending to be a Dalek and nearly being discovered, and the mature characterisation of the anxious Thal Antodus – scared of danger and conflict to the point of almost total paralysis – are other notable examples of many strong moments in this gripping storyline.
The Doctor seems like quite a threatening presence at this stage. Viewers at the time would have had absolutely no reason to trust this secretive and slightly sinister old man. The show had had no ‘He’s ancient and forever’ or ‘Never cruel or cowardly’ or ‘Always try to be nice and never fail to be kind’ speeches to signpost the Doctor’s heroism. In The Daleks, his untrustworthiness is played up to the max, as it had been in An Unearthly Child, and as it would be in the story immediately following this one, Inside the Spaceship. It’s easy to forget just how darkly this character was initially cast.
A prominent theme of The Daleks is that of sometimes having to fight, of ‘just war’ and the dangers of pacifism. I’ve seen the story described as anti-pacifist, which I don’t think is quite accurate – more that it’s deeply sceptical of pacifism. I listened to the Verity! podcast review of this story, and the very good observation was made that The Daleks was written, made and broadcast at the height of the Cold War, and only eighteen years since the end of the Second World War, which helps one to understand why there might seem to be an anti-pacifist ‘agenda’. Not that everyone alive in 1963 thought the same way, of course; a number of my relatives had been conscientious objectors during the war and remained activists in various anti-war movements, CND, and so on throughout the following decades. With a little knowledge of what they faced, and the courage shown, I bristle slightly at Ian’s attempts to stir some aggression into the Thals, especially when it’s suggested they are weak – or even cowardly – for having adopted a philosophy of peace.
But overall the story presents the issues with a little more depth than that. Alydon gives a good speech about fearing to live. ‘We may be farmers but have we forgotten how to fight?’, he asks his people. But this is countered at the end of the story, having defeated the Daleks, when he asks whether there could have been another way, suggesting he may have been regretting his choices, or at least acknowledging that there was no clear argument either way. The Thals’ original leader, Temmosus, appears to be set up as the foolish side of pacifism, exterminated (the first character to be killed on-screen by a Dalek) as he walks into the Dalek city in a spirit of peace and trust. But what he says before this – ‘They’ll see that I’m unarmed. There’s no better argument against war than that.’ – ultimately, is correct, isn’t it? One side having the courage to disarm is the only way that wars will ever end. It won’t be easy, it won’t be straightforward, and more ‘fools’ will probably lose their lives along the way, but it is the only answer.
I mentioned earlier that there have been various presentations of The Daleks in different formats and media. One of these is the novelisation of the story by David Whitaker, published in 1964 by Frederick Muller, and re-released in 1973 as one of the initial Target Books range, and I decided to re-read this for the first time in many years to assist my reflection upon the tale. It’s a good book, certainly one of the classier titles in the Target series, and pleasingly of its time for people (like me) who have a soft spot for mid-century pulpy men’s adventure novels, although – again, of its time, hopelessly chauvinistic. Reading the chapters roughly in tandem with my watching of the corresponding television episodes, I was surprised by how many divergences there were from the televised story. The book is written in the first person through the eyes of Ian, and its opening chapter is probably the best-known difference in the narrative events, and the simplest to explain: as the book was conceptualised as a standalone product, it needed to introduce Ian and Barbara to the Doctor, Susan and the TARDIS without having to summarise the televised events of An Unearthly Child, so a new beginning is written in which Ian encounters Susan and her private tutor Barbara on Barnes Common following a traffic collision, and then stumbles into the TARDIS following a tussle with the Doctor.
Thereafter, various other events happen a little differently from those shown on the telly, usually with the effect of bigging up the character of Ian. In the book, it’s silly Barbara’s idea to split up to explore the Dalek city, rather than Ian’s. It suggests that Ian knew all along that the Doctor was lying about the fluid link, which is not the impression given on screen. Funnily enough, in the book it’s not Ian who loses the fluid link the second time, nor does he record getting himself trapped inside the Dalek casing. On the printed page there are graphic descriptions of the enormous sea monster that he helps the Thals defeat, whereas on screen we see only bubbles on the surface of the water. Perhaps most intriguingly, the book records the build-up of a steamy romance between Ian and Barbara – although as he describes it, she’s in hopeless denial about it most of the time and is frustratingly moody and femininely complex with him. On TV there is no hint of Barbara fancying Ian, but she does grab a kiss with sexy Thal Ganatus.
The 1965 film Dr. Who and the Daleks, produced by Amicus and written by Milton Subotsky, tells yet another version of events. Ultimately it’s the same story – the Doctor and team meet the Thals and help them to defeat the Daleks – but the details are a little different. What’s the true version of events, and does it really matter? I don’t think so. As with our processing of news of anything that happens in the world today, we have to consider who is reporting it and what spin they might be putting on some of the details.
I think of the various presentations of The Daleks – one of Doctor Who’s most important stories – as similar to the four Gospels collected in the New Testament of the Bible. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John each tell the same story, but there are inconsistencies between some of the details in each book. Different writers bring different perspectives; some of the differences might be political, theological or ideological, and some might just be a matter of variances in sources, and accounts in different languages, sometimes oral, changing over the centuries. It’s up to us how we receive them and reconcile them (or choose not to).
So we might think of the book of The Daleks as The Gospel according to Ian, the televised original as The Gospel according to Barbara (events are shown with the wisdom we might expect to come from her account), and the movie as The Gospel according to Susan (she seems to view herself as the child to whom nobody listens, which would explain her being a much younger girl in the film version, and everything is more colourful, exciting and dynamic, as it might be if described by a child). Is there a fourth Gospel? Perhaps that’s still to be written: the Gospel of Alydon maybe, or what about the Gospel of Clara Oswald, a splintered-through-the-Doctor’s-timeline version of whom must be hanging around somewhere in the story? That would bring an interesting new perspective on events.
The Christmas Invasion
‘Did you miss me?’ God yes. That moment of the Doctor opening the TARDIS doors and stepping out into the Sycorax spaceship, grinning from Gallifreyan ear to ear (had the Doctor grinned such a winning, seductive smile since Tom Baker?), is one of Doctor Who’s top moments, in my book at least.
Debut stories for new Doctors are a funny business. However excited I might feel about the beginning of a new era, I usually feel nervous. It’s a bit like starting a new job, the first day of school, or the start of the football season. Maybe a first date, although I’m fortunate not to have had many of those. There’s the whole ‘getting to know you’ awkwardness to suffer before one can really feel at ease with the new Doctor. I just want that all out of the way, so we can set off in the TARDIS and get on with the adventures. In Doctor Who the convention seems to be for the Doctor always to struggle in the first few hours following their regeneration – to be physically incapacitated, confused or somehow just not yet their new self. I hate this period. I know it’s deliberate, and as the audience we are supposed to feel disturbed or bereft, so the new Doctor can finally win us over with some heroic act of reassurance, but gaaah, it’s upsetting! And it’s such a relief when the new character finally spreads their wings.
Russell T. Davies clearly knows how it all works, and he pulls all the right strings to properly introduce David Tennant in the most satisfyingly manipulative way in The Christmas Invasion. Those opening thirty-nine and a half minutes in which the Doctor impotently stumbles and sleeps, while Rose and the rest of the world abandon all hope, have a sort of grey-skied Christmas morning before anyone’s really got their head around what day it is sort of feel to it. Then, finally – and what a brilliant idea that it was an inhalation of Jackie’s tea that did it – he opened those TARDIS doors and we knew that Santa had delivered at last.
That big, grandstanding speech is so much fun and so reassuring, I find it virtually impossible to watch now without smiling. Teasing and belittling the Sycorax chief: ‘Big fella’ and the ‘I don’t know!’ mocking roar. (I’m ashamed to admit that I only just got the ‘You just can’t get the staff!’ gag on this, probably the fifteenth or twentieth time I’ve rewatched the scene.) The cheeky wink at Rose, the Lion King gag, the ‘big, red, threatening button’. All this followed by a swashbuckling sword fight, the crowd-pleasing ‘It’s a fighting hand!’ moment, and the hard-eyed ruthlessness of ‘No second chances. I’m that kind of a man’, and we have a clearly-defined, dynamic, joyful, intriguing new Doctor revealed to us all in the space of just over eight minutes. The Earth is defended, and so is the future of its greatest television show.
I remember watching my son James, aged four and a half at the time, fall in love with this new Doctor through The Christmas Invasion. He liked Doctor Who before it, but I don’t think he’d yet fallen for a Doctor quite like he fell for Ten. I bought him a little brown pinstripe suit, a tie and a toy sonic, and it’s pretty much all he ever wore for months afterwards. He could say better than me, but I reckon his favourite scene was the TARDIS dressing room one, in which the Doctor chooses his new outfit and nods approvingly at himself in the mirror, to the sound of Song for Ten. James would often mimic this in his own bedroom mirror. He was pretty obsessed, so I’ll always have a soft spot for it myself.
There’s a problematic element to all of this, of course. I remember being at a Doctor Who convention in the eighties and listening to Janet Fielding say that there was something wrong about a programme that suggests we all place our trust in a heroic fantasy man to continually turn up and save the day, which is pretty much the plot of The Christmas Invasion. I do agree with that, and I’m aware that like so many people I have a history of idolising the big (usually white, usually male) hero – in religion, in football, in politics, and – for as long as I can remember – in Doctor Who. But I can’t deny the pleasure that this story brought and still brings me. I felt similar after Rose, The Eleventh Hour and The Woman Who Fell to Earth (less so after Deep Breath, as discussed here). It’s an aspect of having a fannish nature that it’s important to remain aware of. Perhaps it means I’m exercising cognitive dissonance, burying an uncomfortable truth about the programme I love because I don’t want the pleasure it brings me to be spoiled. All I can do is acknowledge the feelings – what I like, but also what’s bad about it, and try keep one balanced against the other.
To be fair to RTD, the Tenth Doctor’s subsequent trajectory does divert from this sunny saviour course; the Time Lord Victorious storyline shows the dangers of ascribing divinity to a man, and we see many of Ten’s ‘ordinary’ friends and companions taking on the heroic role. Being inspired by someone to discover the hero within yourself is a little healthier, I think.
Before the Doctor’s recovery, The Christmas Invasion seems about as typical a story of the RTD era as it’s possible to get. If you asked an AI to write a Doctor Who script in the style of RTD, it might look much like this. All the hallmarks are there: the ‘kitchen sink’ drama of the Tyler flat on the Powell estate (Rose and Jackie have a conversation literally at the kitchen sink), ordinary people on Cardiff streets that don’t quite look like South London streets, looking up at a menace in the skies, TV newsreaders to give the story a sense of national and international scope, Harriet Jones Pri- (yes, we know who she is), and everyone sharing pleasure in the ordinary things of life that link us together – dressing gowns, fruit, sandwiches and a flask of tea, and, at Christmas, Slade, crackers and romantic wishes for snow.
More surprising to me was the number of British flags on display, and the general sense of everyone living in a proud, patriotic Britain. Jones is flanked by a couple of flags in her televised news conferences, and Jackie tells Rose ‘They’re calling it “Britain’s Golden Age”’. There’s various bits of sabre-rattling through UNIT, and Jones telling the US president that ‘he’s not my boss’. I think this washed over me a little when I first watched it; in 2005 it probably seemed like just another slightly fanciful alternative future. In 2023, with flags and patriotic dog whistling commonplace across our media and political briefing rooms, it feels much more on the nose. Not that this isn’t part legacy of where we were politically in 2005, of course. My guess is that RTD thought much the same as his portrait of Jones (and her Belgrano-esque ordering of the destruction of the retreating Sycorax spaceship) makes fairly direct reference to Falklands Thatcher and WMD Blair.
Finally, something small that has always bothered me about The Christmas Invasion is the little whispering noise you can hear emanating from the breath of regeneration energy released from the Doctor’s lungs before rising into space. It felt to me at the time that there was some special significance to this, as if a part of the Doctor, or an unconscious message from the Doctor, was now floating around the stars, to have some bearing on a later episode. I suppose the idea was just that this was ‘noise’ indicating the Doctor’s presence on Earth, drawing the attention of the pilot fish and ultimately of the Sycorax. But it just seemed like something more, and I’m still half expecting it to pop up with an important bearing on a future episode. Maybe it’s what’s caused the Fourteenth Doctor to take on the appearance of the Tenth? Unlikely, I know.
Connections
Earlier on I described The Daleks and The Christmas Invasion as two of the most important Doctor Who stories. By that I mean that while neither of them quite started an era, as such – The Daleks was the second ever story to be broadcast, and The Christmas Invasion kicked off the second season of the twenty-first iteration of the show – they both exercised great influence on how Doctor Who would subsequently develop. The former introduced the Daleks, of course, and took the show squarely into sci-fi territory but also went a significant way to establish the format of a ‘TARDIS team’ comprising the mysterious Doctor and one or more audience-relatable companions. The Christmas Invasion brought levels of supreme confidence and self-belief to a show which perhaps wasn’t quite sure of itself – or, at least, of what sort of reception it was going to receive – during the preceding Ninth Doctor season. David Tennant seized centre-stage and quickly established a relationship with Billie Piper’s Rose that I think has become more iconic in the public consciousness than that she ever shared with Christopher Eccleston. There’s a pace and a chutzpah about this story that continued throughout the Tenth Doctor’s run. I remember starting to believe RTD’s confident predictions that Doctor Who was back and would stay around for many years to come. The Christmas Invasion also helped the show’s new audiences understand the concept of regeneration, paving the way for further changes of actor over the following years, and it established the modern tradition of the Doctor Who festive special.
As for more direct connections between the two stories, I wonder whether the spilled tea re-establishing the telepathic circuit connecting the Doctor, the TARDIS and Rose was a clever little reference to the absent fluid link of The Daleks.
‘That man was your prisoner! Even your species must have articles of war …’ The Daleks’ cold-blooded murder of Temmosus is shockingly callous, rather like the Sycorax murder of Major Blake and Danny Llewellyn. There’s nothing particularly unique in about Doctor Who aliens randomly killing white flag-waving humans, but there’s something quite similar about these ones. Perhaps it’s the special effects used in both stories, capturing the victims in deathly freeze-frame.
Both stories contain high peril with characters teetering on the edges of ghastly high drops. Don’t look down, Antodus!
There are plenty of food on show too. The Daleks leave a feast of fruit and veg (and some loo rolls, which they probably don’t need any more themselves) out on tables to tempt the hungry Thals. The TARDIS crew have already eaten though, courtesy of the time machine’s handy gastronomic tablet dispenser. Items from Jackie Tyler’s grocery shop make several appearances in The Christmas Invasion, from apples and oranges in dressing gown pockets through to a traditional turkey feast to end the day’s festivities.
And what could be more important than a picnic on the eve of war? There’s a deckchairs on the Titanic feel to both Jackie’s bags of tea and sandwiches as the Sycorax ship hovers over London, and to the swampside snacks (it’s not clear exactly what they’re eating on TV, although Whitaker’s book describes ‘a hot drink of Ratanda – a kind of nut the Thals cultivated which, when boiled, produced a very satisfying drink rather like orange tea’) consumed by Ian, Barbara and their band of courageous Thals ahead of their assault on the Dalek city.
I wrote above about the dramatic impact of the Doctor being unavailable for much of The Christmas Invasion, and there is a little bit of that in The Daleks too, as the Doctor succumbs to radiation poisoning in part two. The dispiriting nature of this is less to do with the absence of a hero than the absence of the only one of the Daleks’ prisoners who might have some understanding of their situation, but still: we miss the Doctor when he is not there. However, his removal from the action means that both Rose and Susan have to find the courage to step up – Rose to face down the Sycorax leader, and Susan to brave the mysterious forest to retrieve the radiation antidote.
‘No second chances. I’m that sort of a man.’ The Tenth Doctor’s limited tolerance seems to be a step away from the more conscientious, war guilt-ridden Ninth, and there’s an echo here of the First, who dismisses a dying Dalek’s plea for mercy with little sentiment: ‘Even if I wanted to, I don’t know how.’
The Daleks makes a deliberate point of the fact that the First Doctor is a traveller, a nomad. For him, it’s all about the road, the journey is the destination; there is no great desire to settle down or to find a home. ‘My truth is in the stars,’ he tells Alydon, ‘and yours is here.’ This is another trait of the Tenth, made clear as Jackie questions the wisdom of travelling back out into the great unknown: ‘All those planets, and creatures and horizons. I haven't seem them yet! Not with these eyes.’
Comentarios