Right Preparations for the Parliament scenes in Asylum of the Daleks.
Photo ©Russell TDavies.
Mark wasn’t available for the shooting of the asylum sequences, but he was later brought in to operate one of the bronze Daleks for the filming of the parliament scenes. “The set was huge,” he recalls, “and there were dozens of Daleks. We spent up to 11 hours each day inside the Daleks, with just a few breaks for air and lunch. We were given a bottle of water to string around our neck so we didn’t get dehydrated.”
A replica of a casing from Genesis of the Daleks (1975) was borrowed from former (and future) showrunner Russell T Davies, who’d purchased it long before he began work on Doctor Who’s relaunch in 2005. “Way back in the 1990s, [writer] Paul Cornell took me to a Doctor Who convention in Manchester,” Russell explains. “I met some Dalek builders and thought, ‘That would be great for my house!’ So they made one and delivered it, and assembled it in my hallway, and there it sat, for years.”