It’s November 1966, and Doctor Who is in a very different place than where we left it. In the 18 months since our last story, the show has gone through a series of significant changes in producers, script editors and cast members, shedding about a third of its audience in the process. But none of these has been as traumatic and risky as the change that happened at the end of the previous episode, The Tenth Planet, in which the Doctor, his body worn out, collapsed and transformed in front of us into a new and unknown character.

It’s hard, at this late stage, to find much to say about The Power of the Daleks that hasn’t been said. Everyone knows it’s Doctor Who’s most important make-or-break story until 2005. That said, the introduction of the new Doctor is handled as safely as possible. Sydney Newman got involved in the casting decisions and a well-respected character actor was chosen in much the same way that Peter Davison would later be a safe option to take over from Tom Baker. After 18 months’ absence, David Whitaker, the show’s original script editor, was brought back to write the transition story. And the Daleks also return after 10 months off the screen (their longest absence since 1964). In short, everything about the making of this story shows a production team careful to mitigate the impact of losing their leading man.

And on the surface, the changeover was successful in boosting the ratings of a show that had been in decline throughout 1966, pretty much since February when, in the aftermath of The Daleks’ Master Plan, viewing figures went into a steady decline. The first episode of The Power of the Daleks was watched by 7.9 million viewers, the show’s best performance since The Celestial Toymaker in April. And the improvement was sustained across the remainder of the fourth season. The average ratings of the four months prior to The Power of the Daleks were 5.3 million viewers. In the four months after they jumped to 7.7 million. For some reason, the last block of Hartnell episodes was not bringing in audiences – which suggests that on top of all the behind-the-scenes concerns regarding Hartnell’s increasingly difficult behaviour, there was a very obvious drive to visibly renew the show and hopefully bring back audiences who had switched off in droves during the past six months.

So, The Power of the Daleks is not just ringing the changes for the Doctor. It heralds a new approach to making the series, albeit one that’s been trailed by small tweaks like the removal of individual episode titles from The Savages onwards – helping to sign-post each new adventure as a discrete entity with its own “opening night”, and allowing viewers to know exactly how far through each one they were. After the prototypical base under siege story of The Tenth Planet – which still found time for scenes in Geneva and in space – Vulcan really is an isolated outpost, with its sabotaged communications room precluding any contact with Earth. And the story is set on a human colony in the near future, involving a struggle between rebels and the established order. Nowadays those elements sound like the most clichéd Doctor Who plots imaginable.  But, with the arguable exceptions of The Space Museum and The Tenth Planet, they never crop up during the Hartnell era.

In this power struggle, the Daleks are an insidious menace – an entirely unimaginable role for them in any previous story. But, as we have seen, in an odd way their power mirrors that of the Doctor, and, like him, they enter this story diminished: a strange, unknown quantity. And that’s true of The Power of the Daleks too: although we have the soundtrack, screen grabs and several clips, this is one of those tragically missing stories that’s just beyond our grasp, where we have to second guess what’s going on. There’s a lengthy TARDIS sequence at the beginning of the first episode which, presumably, is about Troughton making the Ship his own space, and which the audio and telesnaps can’t adequately recreate. That’s going to be an increasing issue as we go into the largely-missing Troughton years, which coincide with this new way of making the show and its growing reliance on the grammar of action TV.

Then there’s the new Doctor himself. As Ben says, “It’s not just his face that’s changed, he doesn’t even act like him.” The Hartnell Doctor took a delight in seeing the spectacle of the universe, always wanting to know what was on the other side of the hill. The Troughton Doctor knows that it’s something horrible, something evil. The child-like delight is still in there, but this is a darker, more suspicious character, hovering ominously at the edges rather than marching boldly in. In many ways Whitaker is taking the show back to its origin, with the Doctor a mysterious, even dangerous presence and the audience identifying with his two human companions, snatched from contemporary Earth and not entirely trusting his motives. But, crucially, whereas the first Doctor was wrong to fear Ian and Barbara, Whitaker makes this new Doctor right to be suspicious. His dire warnings invariably come true. Here, Lesterson has been prying into corners of the universe that should have been closed off, and unearthing things that should have been forgotten. Like the protagonist of an M.R. James story, his crime is intellectual pride and curiosity, and his punishment is to unleash a demonic evil whose retribution is disproportionately cruel.

That’s a huge shift for the show: from the universe of wonders of the Hartnell years, to a universe of terrors for Troughton. Base under siege doesn’t just describe most Troughton stories – it’s an appropriate description for the whole tone of the era, where Earth and humankind are now besieged and at the mercy of terrible things from the cold, dark corners of the universe. That cosmic paranoia and creeping horror is going to be the norm for the show for most of the rest of its existence, and whether he’s visiting Earth or exiled there, from now on the Doctor is going to have to protect us.

Next Time: “We’re talking about the Daleks: the most evil creatures ever invented. You must destroy them!” It’s the final end on Skaro in The Evil of the Daleks…

May, 1965. Since our last entry, the Doctor, Ian and Barbara have rescued Briton of the future Vicki, caused Rome to burn, visited the planet of the insects and been caught up in a bizarre hybrid of comedy and timey-wimey sci-fi on the planet Xeros. No wonder as this story starts they’re all taking a week off.

There’s an old story that certain editions of Trivial Pursuit contained the question “Who created Doctor Who?” The answer given was Terry Nation. For many fans, that’s a laughable assertion given that Nation is more well known as the hack whom Barry Letts accused of trying to sell the same script four times. And there’s no doubt that Nation was at the least a lazy writer – this is his fourth script for the show and already he’s done two dead planets and two deadly jungles. But to focus on the repetitive elements in his work tends to overlook how much he actually did contribute to Doctor Who, and just how creative a writer he can be – even in a piece of work that’s as widely derided as The Chase.

The opening episode, for example, has some beautifully judged comic lines (unsurprising, given Nation started his writing career with a script for The Goon Show), and is as charming as anything the series has offered to date. And more than that, it’s clever enough to actually play with the idea of the series as a TV show by having the Doctor fire up his own space/time television and tune into various historical events, making the TARDIS the equivalent of the viewing public’s living room, to the extent of having the crew contend with fuzzy screens and BBC continuity announcers. Later, he has Ian – who’s already said a book on space monsters is “a bit far-fetched” – point out that Daleks don’t like stairs, just like everyone’s dad will have been doing for the last year. When we see this kind of playful self-awareness in Season 17, it is championed as another example of Douglas Adams’ legendary wit. We should equally praise Nation’s sophistication here.

But more than that, Nation is not only recognising Doctor Who as a TV show. He also makes The Chase into a celebration of the show’s clichés – the regulars keep getting knocked out, there are exotic locations that change unpredictably from alien planet to Earth history week on week, it’s a weird mix of horror and comedy, there at least five new monsters on top of the Daleks, Hartnell has an unconvincing stand-in and the whole thing is a chase. What’s astonishing is that most of the tropes of Doctor Who have already been nailed within its first 18 months on the air; that Nation consciously puts them all together, and even starts to poke fun at them, compressing what could be four or five serials into one.

What this means is that by May 1965, Doctor Who was enough of an institution to have its own recognisable house style, and The Chase is interesting because it plays as a rapid montage of all the different things the show can do. No wonder the Beatles are in it: this is Doctor Who’s version of their Help movie, another pop artefact inspired by the anarchic comedy of the Goons. And while Beatlemania was going on in the charts, Dalekmania was underway in the toyshops. Later in 1965 the Dr. Who and the Daleks movie was released. At this point the series was regularly pulling in audiences in excess of 10 million. This is as good as it got in the 1960s – and only Hinchcliffe-era Tom Baker and Series Four David Tennant have ever beaten it. In the space of 18 months, Doctor Who has gone from a mild curiosity in a junkyard to a British pop-cultural phenomenon – and this is the TV show’s ultimate expression of that. In the fourth episode, Terry Nation implicitly places the Daleks on a level of screen villainy equal to that of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. 48 years later, we can see he was dead right.

Ah, the Daleks. Because for all this is a celebration of Doctor Who, Nation never lets us forget it’s his creations that made the show a success. The first four Dalek stories are a fascinating study in escalating stakes. They start off plotting evil from their space city, then they conquer the Earth. Now, they’ve got a time machine and they don’t have to wait for the Doctor to come and disrupt their plans – they can follow him and wreck all his adventures. This is the first time that the Daleks know who the Doctor is. I suggested in the last post that the Doctor has defined the Daleks as his greatest enemy, and this helps establish him as a hero. The Daleks changed his nature. But equally, he has changed their nature: through knowing him, they have evolved into time travellers with the whole of the universe as their stage, and in a position to put the very nature of the Doctor’s power under threat. Before The Chase, the Doctor was unique in his ability to travel anywhere in time and space in a box that’s bigger on the inside. This is the first time he’s had to face a threat with the same power (and interestingly, in the very next story he’s going to have to face it again). And because they are now able to follow the Doctor anywhere in time and space, the Daleks are placing the show’s very ability to continue in danger. This serial has to be a chase, to show the Daleks can now drop into other space adventures or historicals. Everything the show has done to this point is unsustainable if the Daleks are not defeated. No wonder there’s an episode called The Death of Doctor Who: that’s exactly what’s at stake here.

It’s hard to think of how you can make the Daleks much more of a threat. Later in the year The Daleks’ Master Plan plays a clever sleight of hand by having the Daleks use their power over time as a threat to the universe rather than the Doctor himself. In many ways their next story is stronger because it’s better made, more obviously epic, and has two companion deaths with which to make its point. But it doesn’t strike at the heart of the series quite as much as this.

Of course, the Daleks are defeated. But again, there’s a price to pay. Having lost Susan at the end of the last Dalek serial, now Ian and Barbara say their goodbyes in a lovely little sequence that has them arrive back in a junkyard in London. But, here’s Nation’s last clever touch: rather than the Doctor taking them home, he and Vicki watch it all on TV. Six months ago, the show would have ended if the Doctor got Ian and Barbara home. Instead, the story finishes with the Doctor and Vicki switching off the telly and flying off into space and time to have more adventures.

And there you have it. The paradox of Terry Nation is also the paradox of The Chase: a shameless hack work that’s also deliriously inventive, showing a total disregard for the constraints of what could be done on TV in 1965 and in so doing showing what might be done. In a very real sense, Terry Nation did invent Doctor Who.

Next Time: “It’s not only his face that’s changed – he doesn’t even act like him.” The new Doctor faces an old enemy in The Power of the Daleks.

November, 1964. Since our last post, the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan have battled the alien Voord and visited the planet of the Sensorites, been caught up in various escapades in Earth’s history, and, most recently and oddly, shrunk to one inch tall. Now, at World’s End, they’ve arrived back where it all began – in what looks like a junkyard in London.

The opening episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth consciously evokes An Unearthly Child. For a few minutes at least, the TARDIS crew believe that they’ve accomplished their year-long mission to return Ian and Barbara home. But it’s a false hope. And by the end of the story, this crew, this strange family who have grown together over the past 12 months, will be torn apart.

The story is interesting because it subverts what’s become the typical approach since, really The Daleks where the TARDIS crew explore their environment, try to work out where they’ve landed and only gradually understand the danger they’re in. Here, Terry Nation takes the familiar and gradually starts to make it unsettling. To an extent, this production team already tried that out in the last story, but this goes one better by actually pulling the rug from under the characters’ feet – Ian and Barbara’s joy of returning home gradually turning to horror as they discover the corpse in the river, the body in the warehouse, and the sinister posters warning it’s forbidden to dump bodies. And in the following episode, Nation makes us look askew at the familiar sights London by juxtaposing them with Daleks in Trafalgar Square and on Westminster Bridge. And in making London suddenly alien and unfamiliar, he is pre-empting a whole vast sub-genre of Doctor Who – in later years we’ll get supercomputers in the Post Office Tower, Cybermen outside St Pauls and the Great Intelligence in the Shard. But Nation got there first, inventing the Yeti on the Loo scenario.

Partly, this is just Nation going one better on his last Dalek script. I noted that the dead planet is a neat stand-in for a post-nuclear Earth. London here is as deserted and eerie as Skaro, and the story takes great delight in making the city seem as frightening as any alien world. And if the survivors are just human Thals, and the saucer is merely a stand-in for the earlier story’s Dalek city then it doesn’t really matter – the imagery is strong enough to make this a striking step forward in what this series can do.

That’s not the only step forward. The second episode is notable for giving us, at last, the Doctor as an implacable opponent of evil, dedicated to confronting the evils of the universe. Unlike the cranky alien Doctor of The Daleks, you sense that, even if he could just get back in the TARDIS and fly away, the Doctor would no longer be able to contemplate that course of action. Instead, he pledges to “pit his wits against [the Daleks] and defeat them”. So, what we have is an entire planet under the control of the Daleks, and the Doctor believes that he, a teenage girl and two schoolteachers from 1963 can bring them down. And, incredibly, we believe him. Not only that, but then he proceeds to mock their ambitions and call them pathetic. A whole raft of later scenes where the Doctor faces off against, and taunts, the villains –Tom Baker confronting Broton, David Tennant baiting the Sycorax leader, Matt Smith besting the Great Intelligence – start here.

If you watch The Dalek Invasion of Earth conscious that, regardless of broadcast dates, it was made as the end of the first production block – the show’s first “series finale”, if you like – it makes a lot of sense, as it brings to a head the character development of the first year. We started off last November with a mysterious and aloof character who, through his experiences with Ian and Barbara across those first 13 weeks, mellowed. Even then, on Marinus or in Mexico his concern was never to intervene in local difficulties, merely to explore and get back to his Ship and on to the next destination – hopefully Sixties London so he could divest himself of his kidnapped passengers. In The Sensorites, he finally took the plunge of investigating the Sensorites’ illness, but that was more akin to solving a puzzle than taking on evil. But now, he’s suddenly the self-appointed defender of the Earth. And he never goes back: from this story on, whether it be unmasking Koquillion or defeating the Carsenome, the series is taking a decisive move in making the Doctor the hero in his own series – and in so doing, guaranteeing the show’s survival if William Russell decides to leave.

But while making the Doctor a hero, The Dalek Invasion of Earth has one more nasty trick up its sleeve – what is given with one hand is taken away by the other. A wise man once wrote “he who wins shall lose” – and although the Doctor wins his first Earth-saving victory here, he does it at a terrible cost. One of his later incarnations says, “When you have something precious you run and run and run”, presumably referring to the flight from Gallifrey with Susan in tow. And so what should have been a triumphant moment, like so many later victories against the Daleks, is made bittersweet by the departure of someone the Doctor loves. His farewell to Susan, the choke in his voice as he says, “Goodbye my dear”, is the most moving moment in the first year of the series. It’s the first time he, and the audience, have had to say goodbye to a regular character. And it rightly hurts. In later years, Sara Kingdom, Tegan, Rose, Donna, even Ian and Barbara, will leave the Doctor after a battle with the Daleks. But you saw it here first. The Doctor, the man who saves the world, can never settle down, living a life, day after day, never rest, because there are always more evils to be fought, more stories to be told. Once he started running he never stopped. And his tragedy is that no-one else, not even his own granddaughter, can keep up with him forever.

Next Time: “They always survive, while I lose everything.” The Doctor runs, but the Daleks are right behind him. The chase is on…

So, the idea behind this blog is that in the lead up to Doctor Who‘s 50^th anniversary in November 2013, I’ll pick one story per post. The gimmick is that I’ll pick a story from each of those 50 years – the only criteria being that the story has to have been first broadcast (or published) in the year in question.

And so we begin in 1963. But not at the very beginning. I love An Unearthly Child – yes, even the cavemen episodes – but it’s inevitably overshadowed by this, the first Dalek story. This is where it all really began – after four weeks of running round at the dawn of humankind, Terry Nation shows us how it might all end. How, in 1963, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, most people probably thought it would end, and probably quite soon. A dead planet soaked in radiation. Its cities intact but deserted – like the petrified trees and the fossilised monster in the jungle, a cruel mockery of life. The first episode is eerie in a way Doctor Who rarely can be now that it can’t spend 25 minutes purely following the regular cast. And it sells the idea that this is a desolate place, that the TARDIS crew are lonely wanderers, adrift in a vast, empty universe. It’s the kind of juxtaposition of the smallness of humanity and the vastness of the cosmos that Robert Holmes riffs on in The Ark in Space, with Sarah Jane listening to the sepulchral tones of the Earth president as she joins the rest of humankind in their space mausoleum. And later, Russell T Davies emulates in his first two episodes where the Doctor talks about feeling the turn of the Earth, and Rose witnesses its final end.

Of course, it might not have turned out this way. It’s probably fruitless to speculate at this late date how much of “Serial B” was suggested by the production office, because the sets and cast of The Dead Planet could almost serve as the introduction to Anthony Coburn’s The Masters of Luxor. Now we’re able to listen to a version of it thanks to Big Finish and can see the similarities in the premise – a beautiful but dead planet; a huge, seemingly deserted space city made of metal; the TARDIS drained of power and unable to take off; a first episode only featuring the four lead actors, and a race of robots with a pathological dislike of their humanoid neighbours. I wonder whether story editor David Whitaker pitched the concept to both Coburn and Nation, knowing what was affordable, what the BBC effects department could handle, and the kind of story he wanted to see – and then sat back to see what the writers made of this starting point.

But though The Masters of Luxor and The Daleks might have the same jumping-off point, they evolve in very different directions. The Daleks is half Cold War parable and half horror movie. The end of the first episode seems to explicitly reference Michael Powell’s infamous Peeping Tom, with Barbara being menaced by the camera with some kind of implement creeping into shot, just as the Peeping Tom killer filmed his victims as he stabbed them with an adapted tripod. It’s a classic Doctor Who cliffhanger, the girl in peril, that’s both frightening and voyeuristic, inviting us to share both in Barbara’s fear, and also relish it – the kind of pleasing terror that Doctor Who excels in. Later, we have the sequence of Susan being stalked through the forest as though she’s in a Val Lewton film

And then we meet the Daleks themselves. Everything about them suggests a production team that’s trying and succeeding at being iconic. The voices, the extermination effect, the immediately recognisable silhouette complete with all its unfathomable details of bumps and slats and plunger. All these have stood the test of time – even the derided iDaleks of the Matt Smith era hew pretty closely to the original template. Christopher Barry directs them beautifully, with low shots and sympathetic lighting, and Terry Nation includes the grisly detail that the real Dalek is too hideous to show (and going by Ian’s reaction to an image of them, their ancestor Dals weren’t much to look at either). They’re so successful they set the template for pretty much every Doctor Who monster that follows.

But more than that: even in their first appearance, the Daleks are already the Doctor’s ultimate enemy. Ian suggests their hatred of the Thals is a simple dislike of the unlike, a fear of anything that isn’t Dalek. The Cybermen want to convert you. The Master wants to rule over you. The Daleks want to exterminate you. Even though he’s at his least heroic for much of this story, the Doctor is expressly set up as an explorer, whose insatiable curiosity – his greed for knowledge, if you like – is his downfall. He wants to see the universe, to experience it. The Daleks want to destroy it. No wonder they hate each other.

In the next entry, we’ll see that the Daleks come to define the Doctor, making him a great hero by the sheer depth of their villainy. Time and again, they return when the Doctor is at risk of losing himself – and he rises to meet them. And even here, with none of that weight of back-story or audience expectation, something similar happens: the Doctor, at risk of becoming an anti-hero thanks to his selfish actions earlier in the story, chooses to side with the Thals to defeat the Daleks, when he could instead have sold them out to retrieve his fluid link. The Time War – a battle between Time Lords (two of them, anyway) and Daleks for the sake of all creation – begins here. And 50 years later, it still goes on.

Next Time: The Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara land 200 years in the future. They’re back on Earth. But the Daleks are waiting at World’s End.

Yes, so I failed my 2014 New Year’s Resolution to keep my blog up to date. Shame on me. 2015, however, is going to be a different story. Possibly.

Anyway, as a first baby-step towards actually keeping the blog up to date, I’ll be transferring in the posts I originally wrote for a 2013 project called Doctor Who: 50 Years, 50 Stories – a kind of personal meander through the stories I thought told the wider history of the programme. As with this blog, I kind of got diverted in the second part of 2013 and the project stopped with the 1991 post. So one thing I’m going to try to do is finish it and bring it up to date in time for the 10th anniversary of the new series.

So, three months into 2013 and I’m finally getting round to my New Year’s resolution to keep this blog regularly updated. In the next few weeks I’ll be adding my final batch of Doctor Who in the 1980s reviews (covering the McCoy years). And over at 50 Years, 50 Stories I’ll be doing my bit for the golden anniversary.

The idea behind the other blog is that in the lead up to Doctor Who‘s 50^th anniversary in November 2013, I’ll pick one story per post. The gimmick is that I’ll pick a story from each of those 50 years – the only criteria being that the story has to have been first broadcast (or published) in the year in question. The overall aim is to try to identify, through choosing one story to represent each year, how Doctor Who has changed and developed over that time, what the main milestones have been, and which innovations have helped the show survive 50 years. The first two posts – covering 1963 and 1964 – are up now, so please take a look and let me know what you think.