Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 385: Death to the Daleks, Episode One

Dear diary,

Over the last few seasons, there’s been plenty of examples of what I call ‘black spots’ in my Doctor Who knowledge. These represent stories which I know next-to-nothing about. As far as the Pertwee era stands, this is the last of these such stories, and in many ways it’s the last overall. The only things that I can tell you about this story is that it’s got Daleks in (as ever, the clue is in the title), and one of the cliffhangers has something to do with a tiled floor. Supposedly, it’s a rubbish cliffhanger.

Indeed, I think it’s the knowledge of that cliffhanger which has tarred my opinion of this story before I’ve even had a chance to watch it. You see, I’ve been dreading Death to the Daleks, because I’ve spent a number of years believing that it’s probably rubbish. I’ve not ever played the DVD, not even to look at the special features, because of a sense of general apathy towards the story.

Which, it turns out, may have been a huge mistake! This opening episode is pretty fantastic on the whole, and I’ve found myself completely caught up in it. I love it when this happens, and it’s why I always enjoy getting to stories I know so little about - there’s always the possibility that it can surprise me.

Now, of course, it’s the return of Terry Nation, which means the return of some age-old Terry Nation tropes. We’re left solely in the company of the Doctor and Sarah for the most part (we glimpse a hand about six minutes in, and some cloaked creatures 90 seconds on from that, but it’s a full fifteen minutes before any other humanoid characters actually turn up - until then, the only dialogue in the tale has come from one of our two regulars), there’s a small group of desperate military personnel (and, as in Planet of the Daleks, it’s not the regular leader who’s in charge), and then the Daleks turn up in a surprising cliffhanger that absolutely no one saw coming when the title was shown at the start of the story.

And while it seems that I’m complaining again about the reoccurrence of all these things, they’re done very well once again. The Doctor and Sarah being left to their own devices for so long is great fun, and I’m glad to see them in the TARDIS. I was trying to work it out in my head the other day - I knew that we wouldn’t see Tom Baker in the TARDIS console room until Season 13, and wondered if it would take that long for Sarah’s first shots in there, too, so it’s good to see that it’s not the case. My only slight disappointment is that the set is looking a bit tattier than I’d like - it’s far from the gleaming white space of The Three Doctors - and the Doctor seems to be collecting various bits of old fashioned wooden furniture to stand around as storage. As much as I mocked the flat-pack cabinets last time we were in here, this just feels like overkill.

It’s out on the planet’s surface that things really appeal to me, though. I got my first inkling that the story may not be as bad as I’d assumed from the DVD menu, which plays the shot of the TARDIS materialising on a dark, barren, smokey planet. Yes, of course it’s another quarry, but the way it’s shot and designed makes that look very different to the other recent examples. Even the studio-bound sequences on the planet’s surface look really good, and it’s got an atmosphere that I simply wasn’t expecting.

I think that a lot of it comes down to the lighting. Describing the episode to someone earlier, I could only settle for calling it ‘atmospheric’. Right from the start, as power is drained from the TARDIS, through to the eerie green glow on the planet, and the fact that some scenes are shot in what looks like near-darkness, it adds a level of threat to the proceedings that I’m not used to seeing in this series. If anything, it’s certainly one of the better-designed planets the show has seen. In the ‘daylight’ towards the end of the episode, things aren’t quite as effective, but I’ll wait and see more before I make my mind up on it.

So, yes, a great start that I wasn’t expecting. I love that - even after so long - this programme can still throw up surprise gems for me to enjoy!