A Dalek tries to board a London bus on 23 December 1963.
More bus-related publicity, this time with Cybermen from The Moonbase (1967).
Tom Baker and K9 outside the American Embassy in Westminster on 12 February 1978. The queue also includes a Voc robot, a Sontaran, a Dalek, a Zygon and a Wirrn.
Here’s a question for you. When were the Daleks unveiled to the general public?
For most people in the UK, it would have been with the broadcast of the second episode of their first story, which was on Saturday 28 December 1963. But a few lucky residents of west London saw them a few days earlier, on Monday the 23rd, when two Daleks were wheeled around Shepherd’s Bush Market to the bemusement of passers-by. No images from this ‘photocall’ ended up in the UK press, but on the 28th a shot of a Dalek attempting to get on a bus ended up in the Dutch newspaper Het Parool. So not only did the population of the Netherlands get to see the Daleks first, but people were making jokes about Daleks having trouble with steps before they even appeared on television!
The Dalek invasion of Shepherd’s Bush set the tone for a perennial gag in Doctor Who photocalls – seeing the monsters in incongruous everyday surroundings. A Zarbi... waiting for a bus! Cybermen... waiting for a bus! Even those iconic shots of the Daleks on Westminster Bridge fall into this category; they may look like they were taken during filming, but they were part of a press junket that also took in the London Planetarium and other landmarks. Perhaps the ultimate expression of ‘incongruous monsters’ came in 1978, when Fourth Doctor Tom Baker was joined by K9, a Dalek, a Zygon, a Voc robot, a Sontaran and a Wirrn outside the American Embassy, to publicise the series’ sale to PBS stations in the USA.