Daleks – The Ultimate Guide

If you were given to perusing the shelf and a half of Doctor Who tie-in hardback novels in your local library and trying to decide whether to borrow that one with the weird purple TARDIS on the cover or that one where Peter Davison and Some Bloke had been cut out with blunt scissors and affixed to an untidy orange background with classroom paste and a green spatula, chances are that your attention would have been very quickly diverted towards Dalek Omnibus. A block-sized blockbusting collection of three of Terrance Dicks’ most action-packed adaptations – The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, The Day Of The Daleks and The Planet Of The Daleks – it was all bound together in an astonishing Andrew Skilleter cover featuring two Daleks zooming out of a cityscape with ray guns blazing, and frankly looked too exciting to have been anywhere near something so mundane as a shelf. This wasn’t just about the cover or even the contents, though – ever since their very first appearance one chilly evening late in 1963, there has been so much more to the Daleks than their association with Doctor Who. ‘Dalekmania’ swept the UK in the early sixties with every inch as much intensity as ‘Beatlemania’, and while their attempts at conquering the pop charts might not have given John, Paul, George and Ringo too much cause for concern, they enjoyed just as much prominence and dominated just as much of a share of tie-in merchandise, even reputedly inspiring their own range of fireworks. Although it’s difficult to say for certain as, well, there aren’t exactly many of them around now, and if they were then they’d probably be even more dangerous than the Special Weapons Dalek.

Eventually the Daleks became so big that their creator Terry Nation withdrew the rights to use them in Doctor Who and attempted to get their own headlining series off the ground in America; inevitably this did not happen and the Daleks were absent from television or indeed any screens for over five years, but their popularity just would not wane. Following their initial face-off against Jon Pertwee in 1972, they would continue to reappear in what are roundly regarded as amongst the very best stories of Doctor Who‘s original run, and when the series returned in 2005, there only seemed to be one question anyone wanted to ask – when will the Daleks be back?. Which of course they were, bigger and better than ever. Though it’s possibly best not to mention the occasion on which they attempted to make them literally bigger.

From comic strips to feature films to guest appearances on BBC Schools programmes to an annual where they explained how to do ‘tricks’ with phone numbers or something exactly like they were always doing on television, there has always been so much more to the Dalek world – and indeed The Dalek World – and now the makers of Doctor Who Magazine have attempted to cover everything and anything Davros-related in Daleks – The Ultimate Guide, a brand new softback book packed with fantastic illustrations and covering everything from The Creature In The Lake Of Mutations and Bellal’s Mate to Daleks Cutta-Mastic and that time a Dalek threatened to Exterminate some Weetabix. I’ve got a feature in there looking at their various and numerous public appearances over the years, taking in fetes, air shows, BBC promotional tours, The Proms, scaring the audience of a Radio 4 panel show and much more besides, including an encounter with The Beatles. Sadly whether they asked to hear Carnival Of Light is not on record.

You can get Daleks – The Ultimate Guide directly from Doctor Who Magazine‘s website here, from Amazon here and from all good bookshops. You never know, they might even have a spare stray copy of Dalek Omnibus knocking around somewhere.