STACK #146 Dec 2016

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DVD&BD FEATURE

REANIMATING THE DALEKS The classic Doctor Who story The Power of the Daleks returns this month as a new BBC animated production. Scott Hocking spoke to audio engineer Mark Ayres and TARDIS travelling companion Anneke Wills about bringing this lost story back to the screen.

• Doctor Who: The Power of the Daleks

is out on Dec 14

L ongtime Doctor Who fans did a major double take when it was announced that The Power of the Daleks was coming to DVD in December. All six episodes of this classic adventure no longer exist – the master negatives having been destroyed in a short-sighted purging of the BBC archives between 1967 and 1978. But thanks to the efforts of producer Charles Norton, comic book artists Martin Geraghty and Adrian Salmon, and original audio restoration by Mark Ayres, The Power of the Daleks  has been resurrected through the art of animation. And the end result is the next best thing to seeing the original serial. “It looks incredible. I defy anybody not to be absolutely gobsmacked,” says Anneke Wills, who played the Doctor’s companion Polly in the story. “What I like is it has a very sixties’ quality. The drawings are very artistic and I love that it’s black and white – it fits it perfectly.” Mark Ayres agrees: “The animators were very keen on

Missing episodes of Doctor Who had been animated previously for DVD releases, but The Power of the Daleks is the first time that an entire story has been recreated in this medium. “We start with the soundtrack, which is obviously an off-air recording made in 1966 by a chap named Graham Strong,” Ayres explains. “I digitize the quarter-inch tape and make a reference copy running at the right speed, but not restored. That becomes our working master, which is sent to the animators so they can start work. As I get each episode in better shape, I send them a copy. The final soundtracks [on the DVD] are the original restored mono, a stereo version and a surround version and the mixed commentaries. These are supplied as audio files to be married to the animation and off it goes.” In recreating the six episodes as close as possible to the original broadcast versions, the animators referenced the original camera script, as well as off-air ‘tele-snap’ photographs and the only surviving snippets of footage.

getting a sixties’ comic book look – it feels instantly familiar and you feel at home with it.” The Power of the Daleks is a pivotal story in the Whoniverse, being the very first appearance of Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, following the risky decision to replace the show’s lead actor when William Hartnell departed the role. “Patrick set the mould for regeneration and proved you could change the lead actor – and here we are 50 years later and the show is still doing it,” Ayres notes. “He was an inspiration to the last four Doctors,” adds Wills. “Each one of them has said openly that Patrick’s performance was the template.” It’s also one of the best Dalek stories, with the Doctor encountering his old enemies on the planet Vulcan, where they have been revived by a naïve scientist and set about surreptitiously creating an army to do what Daleks do best: “Exterminate all humans.” Bringing The Power of the Daleks back to life involved “a lot of work” for Ayres and the animation team.

To date, 97 episodes of Doctor Who remain missing from

the BBC archives and the search continues to reduce this number. There’s always the possibility that The Power of the Daleks is still out there somewhere, gathering dust in the basement of an overseas television station. “We can hope,” says Ayres. “We were very lucky a few years ago when The Web of Fear and The Enemy of the World turned up – it was delightful to see those again. In the meantime, we’ve done the next best thing. This is missing, we don’t think we’ll get it back, so let’s do something exciting and innovative with it.” So, does this mean that other lost stories will return in animated form sometime in the future? “It’s a commercial world and we can only make this stuff if people buy it,” he offers. That’s a big incentive for all Whovians to add The Power of the Daleks to their DVD collection this Christmas. Not that they need one.

If you could choose another classic Doctor Who story to be animated, which one would it be? Anneke Wills: “I’d like The Smugglers . That’s just personal because it was my favourite story – down on the beach in Cornwall. As a Who fan, I’d also like The Crusade and Fury from the Deep . Mark Ayres: “From a technical point of view, not all the soundtracks are the same usable quality as Power of the Daleks . So if it’s going to be very commercial like we’ve done here, and get shown in cinemas as well, we really do need to think about the best quality ones. So I think Fury from the Deep would be very good. Again, it’s a cracking story and it’s Patrick."

DECEMBER 2016

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