Doctor Who A-Z #16 – The Chase (1965)

Terry Nation started his career writing sketches for Tony Hancock; within two years of The Chase airing he would temporarily suspend Doctor Who‘s right to use the Daleks as he unsuccessfully shopped a big-budget series starring the nickel-plated Nazis around American networks. The Chase feels like a transitional fossil, caught between these two modes of working. You can certainly see that Nation’s imagination was becoming too expansive for BBC budgets. One brief scene in one episode of The Chase involves a reconstruction of the Marie Celeste: it’s invaded by time-travelling Daleks and, well, you can imagine the rest. The very fact that Doctor Who‘s latest Dalek adventure involves a completely extraneous set-piece where the punchline is “it’s the Marie Celeste!”, though, indicates that Nation would always be a sketch-writer at heart.

By any measure the least consequential of the 1960s Dalek serials, The Chase is still never dull. Its six episodes contain enough ideas for six serials; what it lacks in plot and character development it gains in colourfully imagined alien planets and weird monsters. The first episode alone contains cameos from Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare, a rather tubby Abraham Lincoln and the Beatles. The latter are playing themselves, albeit in footage from Top of the Pops. Nation originally wrote a skit involving the Doctor and his companions meeting the Fab Four as elderly men, which would now seem impossibly poignant. The band were up for it but their manager Brian Epstein thought it would ruin their youth-friendly image. As it stands, The Chase includes the only surviving footage of the Beatles on TOTP, an ironic instance of Doctor Who not getting the rough end of the deal when it comes to BBC archive policy for once.

Epstein wasn’t the only person vetoing parts of Nation’s script. A scene where the Daleks are set upon by ghosts, Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster was originally intended to take place in the human imagination, but producer Verity Lambert felt this was too far outside the remit of the show. As it is, the angry Universal Monsters are robots made for the 1996 Festival of Ghana (remember that?), at a loose end after the festival was “cancelled by Peking”. Fascinating though it is to see Nation, whose next serial The Daleks’ Master Plan would have a very Mao-esque villain, predicting Chinese dominion over Africa, the Festival of Ghana segment is exactly the sort of thing that has led people to accuse The Chase of being childish rubbish, skipping from set-piece to set-piece with barely a thought of coherence. 

This is a little harsh. There are, to be sure, parts of The Chase where you can’t shake the feeling Nation is making this up on the spot, not least when the Daleks suddenly reveal they can make a robot duplicate of the Doctor, then refuse to arm it with anything more lethal than a wooden cane. You will be unsurprised to learn this plan fails, as it is pathetic. But the regulars are in fine form, particularly the exiting William Russell, who takes full advantage of the serial’s more comic tone to goof about in last-day-of-term fashion. And in the midst of all the nonsense Nation is getting a firmer grip on his most notorious creation.

In contrast to The Daleks, where the titular monsters react to Ian’s presence in their city by shooting to temporarily paralyse, the Daleks are fully murder-happy here. They massacre the helpless Aridian people (including Hywel Bennett in his screen debut!) without warning, and are given to fanatical chants like “Destroy and rejoice!” The set-up, too, is a major step forward. With the Doctor having foiled their plans twice now, the Daleks now consider him their mortal enemy, and have constructed a time-space machine to pursue him. Previous Doctor Who stories – not least The Daleks – had gone to some pains to explain why the Doctor didn’t simply run off in the TARDIS at the first sign of danger, so the idea that his worst enemies can now follow him on every step of his journey is a significant upping of the show’s stakes. 

It doesn’t deliver on that promised increase in menace, but it does establish the Daleks as something more than a recurring baddie. From here on, they are the only other characters who can occupy the same narrative space as the Doctor and his companions: rule-breaking masters of space and time. The picaresque structure means Nation can’t build to the same kind of devastating showdown that his last two Dalek stories did, but co-director Richard Martin makes up for that with a visually remarkable, budget-defying Dalek conflagration, followed by a bittersweet farewell to the last two of the Doctor’s original companions. William Russell’s rousing cry of “London, 1965!” went unexpectedly viral on Who TikTok a few years ago, and with good cause: even now, when London in 1965 feels only slightly less distant than the Marie Celeste or Dracula’s castle, his joy is infectious.

Next: The Time Meddler (1965)

Graham’s Archive – The Chase

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