"Why can't Babylon Zoo use a Transit like everyone else?"
DR WHO AND THE DALEKS
DIRECTOR: Gordon Flemyng
(Warner Home Video)
THE DALEKS' first foray onto the big screen was never destined to trouble the Oscar committee, but when their alien descendants finally prevail over planet Earth, this little jewel of a timepiece should provide a surprisingly fertile data source for mid-'60s Britain. Notably, that schoolteachers were acceptable objects of hero-worship for impressionable youngsters, and underfunded resourcefulness would prevail against the forces of totalitarian evil.
Thus, we gasp as courting staffroom couple Roy Castle and Jennie Linden (science and history respectively), armed with only a few BBC props, help batty old Peter Cushing and a precocious infant swot save proto-romos the Thais, ostensibly from the ever-unscary exterminating ones, but ultimately from themselves.
Fans of political allegory will recognise Dr Who And The Daleks as a 1965 anti-CND propaganda tract, wherein the peacenik Thais are shown by the good Doctor and pals that there comes a time when freedom must be fought for - that's how England biffed the Bosch, after all. And when faced by Castle and his stiff upper-lip, the Daleks are found wanting in the vorsprung durch atomik bomb department They would soon hire Davros and make a substantially more entertaining fight of it, while Cushing wisely returned to his ketchup-splattered heartland.
Now reissued with its original trailer, this film stretches even Mike Flowers' definition of "good, clean fun'. 6
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