“Every
Dalek Ever!” exclaimed the front
cover of
Doctor Who Magazine
issue
447, which was published several months ahead of the transmission of
Asylum of the Daleks
in 2012.
In his editorial, Tom Spilsbury ramped up the hype: “The first story of the new series is a Dalek extravaganza – featuring every Dalek that the BBC Wales team has been able to lay its hands on.” This was a mission statement originally set out in Steven Moffat’s shooting script, which described the cobweb-strewn Daleks in the gloomy asylum as “all different, every era on display”.
Below right Mark Barton Hill, with the Resurrection of the Daleks replica he loaned to the Doctor Who production team. Photo ©Mark Barton Hill.
The task of amassing an army of Skaro’s deadliest monsters fell to Art Department co-ordinator Donna Shakesheff, who got in touch with Andrew Beech, curator of the heritage section of the Doctor Who Experience for BBC Worldwide. Now called BBC Studios, the corporation’s commercial arm provided two bronze-coloured props together with the Special Weapons Dalek from Remembrance of the Daleks (1988), while a number of shells from the show’s ‘classic’ era were sourced from outside organisations and collectors. Andrew himself loaned his own replicas to the production – a variant that matched the Daleks seen in their very first TV story, and one of the Emperor’s black-domed guards from The Evil of the Daleks (1967). “They’d been built as private commissions many years before, using fibreglass elements cast from moulds created from the originals,” he explains. “Back then I hadn’t anticipated that they would prove useful when we were sourcing exhibits for the Doctor Who Experience in 2010. A major display that was agreed on for the exhibition element was a timeline of Dalek design over the decades. But the BBC no longer had, or had any access to, the earlier Dalek casings. And the Experience budget wouldn’t stretch to building them from scratch. So it was agreed that the BBC would arrange minor refurbishments and tweaks to my two Daleks to make them fully accurate facsimiles, and I would loan them to the Experience throughout its run.”