Ten unexpected places to find a Dalek…

1. As bridesmaids in The Vicar of Dibley
The final episode of Dawn French’s sitcom in 2007 saw the Rev Geraldine Granger get married, accompanied down the aisle by Alice (Emma Chambers), dressed as David Tennant’s incarnation of the Doctor, and by two bridesmaids dressed in Dalek costumes. For no apparent reason.

2. As porn stars
After Katy Manning left Doctor Who in 1973 (she’d played the Doctor’s companion, Jo Grant), she did a nude photoshoot with a Dalek that appeared in the British men’s magazine Girl Illustrated. ‘That went down like a cup of cold sick,’ she commented later. ‘I thought it was quite funny, but nobody else did.’ A porn movie Abducted by the Daloids, featuring the monsters, surfaced briefly in 2005 but was immediately suppressed by the BBC.

3. In a pulpit
The wave of Dalekmania at Christmas 1964 saw the creatures turn up just about everywhere, but a special mention for silliness should go to the Rev G. Mountain, rector of St Paul’s Church in York, who took a toy Dalek into the pulpit for his Christmas Day sermon. His intention, he explained, was to show the difference between science fiction and ‘the real invasion from outer space when Jesus came not to destroy the world, but to save mankind’.

4. In pantomime
Also at the height of Dalekmania, the monsters made their debut in pantomime, in an amateur production of Snow White at Springfield Lane School in Ipswich. Less excusably they were also to be seen in 2007 in a Birmingham production of Aladdin starring John Barrowman.

5. In the living room of the EU Foreign Secretary
Science fiction fan Baroness Ashton was appointed the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union in 2009. Three years earlier, her husband – the political pollster Peter Kellner – marked her fiftieth birthday with the gift of a full-size Dalek. She kept it in the living room.

6. In a Spike Milligan sketch
Milligan’s sketch in his 1975 TV series Q6 saw a Dalek (with a ‘Pakistani’ accent) at home with his human wife and Dalek son. He moans about having had a hard day (‘Exterminating is hard work’) and proceeds to lay waste to a suburban dining room. This, according to the voice-over, is an everyday scene in a modern mixed marriage; evidently it’s a comment of some sort on racism.

7. As Romeo and Juliet
Terry Nation, who created the Daleks, stopped many attempts to make fun of his monsters. (Spike Milligan only got away with it because he had been Nation’s mentor.) Amongst the sketches that never got seen was one written by Barry Cryer and Peter Vincent titled ‘Dalek Theatre’, featuring the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. ‘You knew he was never going to climb up to the balcony,’ remembers Cryer. ‘He kept crashing off the wall.’

8. On a number one single
The Timelords’ 1988 single ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’, a mash-up of Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock and Roll’ and the Doctor Who theme, featured Dalek voices. In keeping with the low budget of the recording, the video showed a couple of home-made Daleks that seemed to be constructed from cardboard boxes and were visibly propelled by human legs sticking out the bottom.

---

9. On Steve Wright in the Afternoon
The early-1990s Radio One incarnation of Wright’s show included the Down-the-Pan Daleks, a couple of retirees who struggle with adjusting to normal life as ‘innocent, God-fearing citizens’. Political canvassers, poll tax collectors and Jehovah’s Witnesses were best advised to give their house a wide berth.

10. In control of the BBC
In his original script for ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ in 1964, Terry Nation suggested that the Daleks be seen in occupation of BBC Television Centre. That scene was never filmed, but nearly three decades on, the playwright Dennis Potter suggested that the takeover had been achieved. He famously described John Birt, the BBC’s director general, and Marmaduke Hussey, chair of the board of governors, as ‘croak-voiced Daleks’. Both men have long since gone, but the legacy lingered in the Private Eye column ‘Birtspeak’, which celebrated management jargon at the BBC, illustrated with a Dalek.

---