Yes, I like The Daleks. Like many people of a similar age, my first experience of it was via Whitaker’s novelisation. The hard back with a pink cover turned up in our village library, which I guess must have been one of the printings in the sixties, so it was called Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. Eventually I saw a bootleg VHS of the story some time in the late eighties, before the official VHS came out. Despite the differences between it and the book, I still loved The Daleks. I found it compelling viewing and I bought each release up to The Beginning box set. I read The Early Years at a similar time, which included a description of the recording of The Dead Planet, which gave me a greater appreciation of the way it was put together. It was just so exciting to experience the very first appearance of the Daleks!
The story is far from perfect. It’s a bit too long and all the stuff in the caves is a bit dull. The movie version is better paced, although it lacks some of the jeopardy of its TV counterpart.
The colourisation is fine. It’s obviously the product of numerous compromises, which is a shame, but I accept that they had to be made. I know that it had to be edited down to make it a manageable colouring job, but I feel that there is a clash between the tighter, more modern editing and the acting and direction of the original. The colouring itself is impressive, but one of the downsides of it being so good is that you stop appreciating it and the other limitations of the production become a bit more obvious. It’s just as the novelty of the colour wears off that the editing compromises become more obvious. The over reliance on flashbacks becomes irritating. They’re included because there was no other footage to cut away to that would cover some of the in vision edits. They also reduce the amount of colourisation needed. So they were necessary, but are somewhat irritating to watch. I’m also not convinced by the addition of more Dalek voices, giving us “Exterminate” well before its time, but I guess these were designed to help sell the edit in places. It was never going to be perfect and I think they’ve done as good a job as they could have done to fulfil the brief in the available time.
In an ideal world, I’d have liked to see the full episodes colourised with intelligent upscaling. The technology and expertise isn’t there to manage this, yet, but it might be in future. That said, I don’t suppose it would be much more popular.
I’m broadly pro colourising, especially if the originals are retained, but I don’t think that this was the ideal story to work with. I know why it was chosen, but I think one of the later stories with better picture quality might have given a more pleasing result.
Anyway, the black and white episodes are all on iPlayer, so this augmented release is a bonus, whether we like it or not, it doesn’t detract from the originals.
