"In colour and on the wide screen", proclaims the poster for Dr. Who and the Daleks (Studio One, "U"), no doubt to point the advantages of the film over the children's television serial from which it derives.
On the other side of the balance-sheet I might mention it lasts nearly an hour and a half against just under half an hour on TV, reminding us that some prescriptions are more effective in small doses.
Here humour plays a larger part, with Peter Cushing bumbling pleasantly as the inventive doctor whose time and space machine take his family to a planet long ago devastated by an atomic war.
Only the Thals, who with their gilded hair and blue eye shadow looked rather like a stra ballet company, survive in human form, and now all they are seriously short of food.
This is been cornered, of course, by the Daleks, who live in a sort of automatised city of against which Dr. Who and the files eventually mount an attack. Very immoral, the way he overcomes his allies' tendencies to pascifism and we're left with the idea that might is right, which will perhaps upset those in ivory towers but hardly ruffle practical parents.
They know that children regard these Daleks as the real heroes, whenever they do: and, indeed, is not to their resilience and an admirable quality? Here we leave them smitten and smoking: tomorrow, we can be sure, they will be at it again.
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