It’s incredible that there’s only ever been one animated Dalek series. It’s even more incredible that I wrote it.
It was made four years ago, in those mad COVID times when nothing was possible and yet everything was possible. In retrospect, the whole
period seems like a fever dream, and only in the middle of a fever dream could the BBC have made an animated series by accident.
The only experience I’ve had like it was in 2005, when we animated the missing episodes of the 1968 story The Invasion simply because it was the end of the financial year and someone in my BBC department was trying to do something with a pot of money before it vanished. (A few months later, he asked me: “What did we do with that money? Oh, a Doctor Who animation, right… Of two random missing episodes? In black and white? Those times are long gone.)
Daleks!
began much more normally. In 2019, when I was part of the multi-platform
Doctor Who
story
Time Lord Victorious,
the digital team thought initially that it would be nice to have some tiny Dalek cutaways. In other words, little extra scenes told in different animated styles – photorealistic, or a missing black-and-white episode, or imagining what it would be like if the 1960s
TV Century 21
comic strip had come to life.