Interview | Russell T Davies

• Interviewed for Doctor Who
The Dalek two-parter starts on BBC1, Saturday 21 April, 2007

We thought we’d seen the last of the Daleks, but this week they’re back, cooking up some scheme at the top of the Empire State Building in Depression-era New York. We caught up with Doctor Who’s Executive Producer Russell T Davies, to find out why they’re as scary today as they’ve ever been.

What are the Daleks up to in these two episodes?
The episodes are called Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks, and it’s an epic adventure. We last saw them in the episode where millions of Daleks were thrown into the void. Four of them, including the black Dalek, escaped and they’ve travelled to 1930s New York, where they’re low on power and trapped because they have no resources. This story shows how clever the Daleks are. They are full of complicated plans to revive their fortunes and it takes the Doctor a long time to get to the heart of what’s going on. It’s easy to underestimate Daleks as tanks that you can break the wheels off, but inside is a little blob that is really clever and intelligent.

We hear the episodes also feature ‘pig men’. What are they?
The Daleks use them as slaves because, bless them, they are not very good at manual work. They’ve got a history of having humanoid slaves. Back in the 1960s there were robo-men and in the 1970s there were outer space gorillas called Ognons. You can see why the writers do that, because the Daleks literally need a hand sometimes. In this story, people are being kidnapped and experimented on to create pink human hybrids. It’s a throwback to the way the Daleks themselves were created. They’re very good genetic scientists.

Why are Daleks so frightening?
It’s funny, isn’t it? I could think about this for a long time and never come up with a proper answer. There’s something really fundamental in their design. They just work. When we brought them back, a lot of people said: ‘Let’s redesign them’ and came out with these Star Wars-style droid designs. We looked and thought ‘That’s not a Dalek – it doesn’t look like a pepper pot!’ So we kept the basic design and spruced it up a bit.

Are kids today as into the Daleks as previous generations?
Well, radio-controlled Daleks were the top-selling toy last year, and to see the Daleks working for today’s kids is fantastic. That proves they did something brilliant back in 1963 when they invented them.

There are lots of different types of Dalek. Do you have a favourite?
I love all the variations. It’s funny because they are such a uniform race that, if you make any change to them, you become fascinated by it. We’ve introduced our black Dalek. Kids obsess about it because it’s different. The more you take these monsters and give them a hierarchy and a history, the more kids latch onto it. Take Harry Potter. They loved the history of Hogwarts and the story of his family – the detail and mythology of it all.

Did you think of giving the Daleks a different appendage?
In the first series, one Dalek had a sort of welding arm instead of its sucker. And in the last series you saw the sucker drink someone’s brain! This year, a Dalek uses his sucker as a scanner to rate intelligence. The biggest thing was making them fly – but, despite that, people are still making jokes about Daleks and staircases.

Could there ever be a female or a child Dalek?
Well, do you remember that Spike Milligan sketch years ago with the Pakistani Daleks? There was a child Dalek in that. But the Daleks are sexless – they don’t reproduce as such, they’re just grown in tanks. One sex fits all!

Are there any other scary monsters coming up in this series?
In episode six we’ve got a fantastic monster called the Lazarus monster, which is played by Mark Gatiss. It’s one of our scariest ever. We did a werewolf last year, and this is even more frightening.

Interview by Ian MacEwan
© TV & Satellite Week, 2007