Above Preparing to shoot a scene with the Daleks’ Genesis Ark for Doomsday.
Some directors have jumped at the chance to add the Daleks to their CVs, but at least as many others have been keen to avoid them at all costs. “The Daleks were never popular with directors,” confirmed early-1970s producer Barry Letts in the 1994 documentary More than Thirty Years in the TARDIS. He went on to reveal that one director to whom he’d offered a Doctor Who serial had replied in the affirmative – but only as long as she wouldn’t be required to “direct any tin cans”.
The somewhat unwieldy props have never been the easiest of objects to render menacing on camera – as Derek Martinus, director of 1967’s The Evil of the Daleks, told Richard Marson in Doctor Who Magazine issue 108 (cover-dated January 1986). “They had to be shot very carefully and from exactly the right angle, because if you shoot them without care they do look rather tame and ordinary. You had to build up to a Dalek’s entrance. I used to make them lurk in the shadows.”