Dialects beyond the screen!
When I was passing Verity Lambert's office one day, she called me in.
She said, look at this.
This mailbag full of letters.
All for the dialects.
They want more dialects.
I said, that's extraordinary.
And she said, BBC Enterprises, that's before Worldwide, are planning to make dialect tea
towels and dialect soap on a rope.
And she said, I've heard there's going to be a feature film.
Gosh, I thought, you know.
It was at that point that I met my boss in the toilet.
I said to him, you know, I explained to him all about these tea towels and soaps on ropes
and things.
And I said, it all smells of merchandise and money and films.
You know, I said, is any of this money coming my way?
I couldn't answer the following week.
I mean, that was no.
On Saturdays, I and some girlfriends used to go and have lunch in expensive restaurants.
And we were in a restaurant one day, I was with a girlfriend.
And we was, but it was late.
It was like three o'clock in the afternoon on Saturday.
And there was only one other table in the restaurant.
And they were sitting next door to us.
And we got chatting to them and introduced ourselves.
And I, when I said my name, this man said, you have made me a millionaire.
And this man was Walter Tupquell, who had bought the rights.
Because I was earning 1600 pounds a year at the time.
And this man had been made a millionaire from the, by the way, I never got one single, I
never got one single piece of merchandise from Doctor Who.
We'd already made miniature ones to come up out of the sand.
Shawcraft were ready to actually manufacture the small ones and were dying to do it.
There was no opening made for them.
And actually they ceased to make them, ceased to be interested and went out of business.
They gave the franchise to somebody else and lost thousands upon thousands.
Garlic soap.
I would say literally hundreds, I think, of garlic merchandise products that are out there.
I mean, from across the years as well, not just recent series.
We've got everything from bottle openers and hot water bottles to action figures and dress
up kits, which are my personal favourite.
They had garlic models, a garlic game.
And I think there was a garlic comic book.
I think they had a garlic suit.
That Christmas, I remember going into the shops and seeing and being ashamed that there
was a garlic suit made out of PVC with sort of hoops.
I was really annoyed when I was a kid that I didn't get one of those garlic suits.
I wasn't allowed big, expensive toys.
It's a shame, isn't it?
I was scarred by that.
I probably wouldn't have ended up doing the garlic voice if I'd been allowed to have a
garlic suit, because I would have got it all out of my system then.
Early garlics, the first toys that they attempted to market were rubbish.
They were really, really badly made, badly constructed, inaccurate.
And they weren't the models that they should have been, could have been.
These are Lewis Mark's garlic rollerkins, which came out in 1965, which was the boom
year for garlic mania.
You could roll them across any flat surface.
Weirdly, also accompanied in the same range by rollerkin Batman and Robin.
Here we have the Cherry Lee garlic, which were called Swop-Its, because you could pull
their heads off eventually.
You could swap them around, so have a yellow middle and a blue top and a black top and
a slightly strange off-green colour.
Along with the garlic, they also produced a companion mechanoid.
The garlic sold in vast quantities, whereas obviously the mechanoids didn't.
The garlic, I think, was soon dropped and later showed up as space pods where they'd
been cannibalised.
This is a Selko spinning top, slippers, garlic meteorite storm, garlic jigsaw, jet bombers
coming over and garlics exterminating.
This is the garlic book, again, part of the explosion of all the merchandise which came
out at that point.
You can see here you've got this strange insignia on the top, and you've got markings here as
well.
That would have been something only used in the studio to identify one garlic from another.
In the photographs given to the people doing the book in this great rush, they thought
it was actually part of the design itself.
You have here indications of the haste with which garlic just exploded outwards.
Generally, they'd have a piece of graphic on them somewhere.
I thought that always felt like their serial number or barcode.
One of the things we thought we'd do is put a piece of garlic graphics under the eyepiece
so when they'd look at each other and their eyes lined up, they could see who they were
talking to.
This, I believe, was from War of the Garlics, which was a board game.
I quite like the way the head moves.
Exterminate.
I don't know how weird that is.
This is the Daypole garlic.
It's probably pregnant.
I'd certainly had a Daypole garlic toy, which looks a bit unsophisticated compared to the
new toys.
It's a tubby garlic.
This would be a cute garlic you could give someone without any fears that it would actually
exterminate them.
Daypole garlics got so mad that I did actually curb my habit of buying garlic toys.
When you could buy them that were done out in the Stars and Stripes or Union Jacks or
Chrome, I just stopped.
In those days there was no big quality control.
Nowadays we've got important BBC people who look at all these things.
I think the thing that is hard to get right about a garlic is exactly the right proportions.
The Louis Marx ones are so completely off in their proportions, especially the top half
where it's all just squashed into a truncated, flattened down version of what the garlic's
head should be.
It was completely the wrong shape.
Looking back on those Daypole toys, they're not exactly correct garlics, which is a very
polite way of saying it.
It's great when you work on something, when we were working on New Doctor, we didn't realise
that the toys were A, going to be made and B, take off as much as they have done.
When we're talking about garlics specifically, we don't want to do anything that makes them
look too cute and cuddly because that's not their character.
I think one of the reasons that you know they're working again is when you have small children
not only turning up at shops and picking the garlics off the shelves and saying, will you
buy me this?
But the fact that they know, oh that's garlic Thay, I haven't got that one.
I was given a new series garlic and I use it to frighten my cat now because if you press
the button on top, out comes Nick Briggs' voice.
I have my voice activated garlic at home and you know, I quite like shouting garlic to
him and when he shouts, yes.
Such a thing never existed when I was young and it just blows my mind every time I look
at them.
There's part of my brain that's just dancing with joy that such a thing actually exists
now.
The Garlic Chronicles.
In the 60s they created garlic comic strips and garlic books, like the TV 21 here and
every week it had this garlic strip, beautifully drawn garlic strip on the back here.
I was quite a big fan of the garlic comics from the 60s.
The stories I think would take place on their home planet and would involve the day to day
life of being a garlic.
So you did get to see sort of working class garlics, middle class garlics and upper class
garlics.
This is one of my favourite pieces.
It had all these wonderful monsters in it that you wanted to see in the TV series and
you really wanted to see a garlic being squashed by one.
You can see whole fleets of them flying around in space on their discs and yes, come screaming
out of the sky, blowing stuff up.
It was spectacular and epic.
On screen inevitably they get beaten and in the books they are the heroes.
Here you've got a news report about the garlics invading a planet.
The World Security Council met in Washington to discuss the plea but informed sources claim
that no help will be sent at present.
That's nice isn't it?
These people say they're being invaded by the garlics and the World Security Council
met and went, we'll just leave it.
The garlics are very different in the comic strips I think because they are the heroes.
You don't have to have them defeated by the Doctor.
So you can have the garlics versus the rogue planet or the mechanoids and actually cheer
when the garlics win and particularly the Emperor.
The Emperor in the comic strip is such a fantastic character.
Yeah, the Emperor became the central character really throughout the entire run of the strip.
Darveling created the garlics in the aftermath of this terrible war on Skaro.
In the TV21 strip they found it necessary to create the origin of the garlics.
The garlics in the comic strips have names, Garlic Zeg and weirdly it does work.
Garlic Zeg's a fantastic character.
Again a garlic that you really cheer for in that story.
Wasn't he subjected to something or other that made him faster, stronger, meaner?
I think the garlic Emperor didn't like the fact that Zeg was a bit of an upstart and
had delusions of grandeur.
It's a very sweet little story really until you realise that actually the first new garlic,
the first garlic that has conscience if you like, is trying to be exterminated by every
single one of his fellows.
So actually you suddenly realise it's a really sad little story.
And eventually the other garlics tried to kill him and it took a lot of killing.
Playing Garlics.
When they brought Doctor Who to the stage you have to have the garlics involved because
in the public's eye the garlics are as important as Doctor Who.
The first stage play, Curse of the Garlics, didn't even feature the Doctor.
Remember, remember the garlic December.
With Paris in ruins and London in ember.
In times of the future when fears are abating, don't try to forget them.
The garlics are waiting.
They thought, well he's making the TV series, we can't have him in the stage show, so let's
do a story that's just got the garlics in, doing their garlic thing.
That the garlics are waiting.
One day we will rise again.
Then later on when they did Seven Keys to Doomsday in 1974, 5 I think, they got a new
Doctor in.
But he had to face the garlics.
Has the Doctor been found?
Not yet, your majesty.
You know, if you're going to show the Doctor at his best on stage, then who do you get?
The garlics.
Same thing happened with The Ultimate Adventure in the 80s.
It's almost, it's a no brainer really.
The garlics have to be in it.
Like why they use garlics on stage, I have no idea, because I cannot think of a more
awkward or cumbersome thing to try and get on stage, if you tried.
Particularly when I saw Ultimate Adventure, the stage had a rake, so the poor actors inside
of it were constantly stopping themselves, trundling down stage and ending up in the
orchestra pit.
Exterminate the Doctor!
Exterminate!
Rather than sitting there and when the garlics go on stage going, wow, the garlics have arrived,
I sat there and went, oh, they've got the shape slightly wrong and the base isn't quite
at the right angle at the front, so I got more bogged down with the fact that the props
weren't actually accurate to the TV show, more than we've got garlics on stage.
Having done the Garlic Empire series on audio, it feels more dangerous than Doctor Who, because
you always know that the Doctor must succeed, that's the deal with the audience and we love
that, that's fantastic and it's reassuring in the way that the garlics are reassuringly
bad, the Doctor's reassuringly good, but to just experiment with the garlics being let
loose without that reassurance of success, without that reassurance that the garlics
can be defeated, and in a way the garlics are never defeated in Garlic Empire, you know,
it's largely a story of them winning, but of human beings retaining great courage in
the fight against them.
I really did like the scenes between Susan Mendes and the Dalek Supreme, where the Dalek
Supreme was trying to get Susan Mendes to work for him.
Do you take pride in what you have done?
Answer!
The Dalek Supreme was toying with Susan Mendes' ideas of hope, that if she stayed alive and
worked for the Daleks, there was hope that she could defeat them one day, and yet the
Dalek Supreme thought, yeah, but you never can, you know, and there was all this going
on, and funnily enough, when I was doing Dalek, the first one in the new TV series, Russell
T. Davis was chatting to me on the phone about the burning intelligence of the Daleks, and
he said, it's like those scenes with Susan Mendes in Dalek Empire, you know, we need
to get that sort of feeling across, I know you know how to do it, because I've heard
it before, you know.
Dalek, I love you!
All our great baddies in history, all are ludicrous in some way, like, we know that
Hitler was ghastly, but he was kind of short with a stupid moustache, you know, and we
have always mocked the most evil things in our history, and the Daleks, because they're
not real, they're even, you know, riper for that kind of satire, really.
I have a theory, because I've spent this afternoon going through all the Private Eye old issues,
looking at various cartoons of Daleks, which date right back to the 60s, and my theory
is that they're very easy to draw.
Not only are they easy to draw, but they're easy to do basic gags with, because Daleks
have, and this is something about the way cartoonist minds work, they have large circles
on them which look a bit like boobies, and they have sticking out things that go like
that when they get excited.
Apart from that, I think they're a good cartoon shorthand, you've got your desert islands
and your specific things you can always use.
Daleks are quite easy to draw, and you get the message of what a Dalek is doing, it's
kind of, even though we all know, as Doctor Who fans, that they're not robots, they're
kind of shorthand for a robot.
So it's very easy to get a joke out of them by making them suddenly be subverted in that
way.
You can have them suddenly chanting that they need chocolate biscuits, because the whole
essence of what a Dalek is, ultimately of course, could never actually lighten up and
have a break.
They're best when they're barking orders, and for some reason, exterminate!
It works if it has several syllables in it, which is why you've got cartoonists and comedians
doing, I don't know, expectorate!
But it kind of works with this sort of management speed, which is where you ram in five syllables
where one would usually do.
It works perfectly for the Dalek's voice.
The Daleks don't bother communicating with the people they invade, they just kill them,
or tell them what to do, or starve them, or make them work, you know.
So the Daleks are a good metaphor to use for saying that someone is really rubbish at their
very responsible job.
And it was actually Dennis Potter, the playwright and celebrity psoriasis sufferer, in his speech
at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 1993, who referred to John Burt as a croak-voiced
Dalek, and an alien who was kind of coming in and invading the BBC with strange new ways.
And somehow it was just one of those things where they didn't actually sound very much
like a Dalek, and he tends to wear Armani suits rather than Dalekinium armour.
It just suited him perfectly.
Meaning, of course, he had no ability to understand comedy, or drama, or imagination whatsoever.
We started to get sent in all these examples of the most extraordinary Burt-speak, or management-speak,
and nonsense and gobbledygook that was going around the BBC at the time.
This is from a memo which was about how people should arrange their offices.
I shall be on sites during the next six to eight weeks to manage and install a new filing
stroke storage system from which you all may benefit.
This may incorporate some reconfiguration of desking.
Has there ever been a more Dalek-like phrase than,
Reconfigurate Desking?
Richard Sandbrook, the director of BBC Global News says,
We created this pan-divisional post to enable us to communicate a unified and compelling
global news message around the world.
And thereafter to drill out the core of the world and steer it off into space.
The Corporate Breakthrough Advisor will align...
...breakthrough more closely with business needs, support the existing network of advisors
and facilitators, work with business unit heads and other managers who want to develop
their use of team-based problem solving.
These are not human words.
These are alien words.
The BBC is best symbolised by Tom Baker's Doctor Who.
Sort of slightly shambolic, aware of his role, kind of winking to camera and doing a bit
of business occasionally, and something people are quite fond of.
This kind of new culture and this new management.
It was seen as a sort of sinister, very untraditional kind of alien way, alien thing coming in and
threatening cuddly old Aunty Bee.
Dalek facts.
Kids love lists of facts and background information.
So in the books particularly, they invented all this stuff about the Dalek creed and what
the Daleks stood for.
And then suddenly all the Dalek language and various weird words that the Daleks would
use, which of course they never did.
Terry Nation says that he translated these things from alien cubes he found in his garden.
He went to David Whittaker's house and he helped him out a bit.
I find that quite funny.
I find it also very funny because it implies that everything else in Doctor Who isn't like
that.
You know, that Bill Stratton with his Zarbi didn't find Zarbi cubes, but only the Dalek
stuff which is actually real.
What enemies do the Dalek have?
The Daleks consider every living creature in the universe to be their enemy.
Did you know that the colour red is unknown on the planet Skaro?
The Dalek sees through a colour corrected electronic eye.
When it was constructed, red was not included in its perception range.
So the new red Dalek in the new series, all the Daleks are there going, who's saying that?
There's a map of Skaro which you learn that one of the continents is called Darren, which
is great because I had a friend at school called Darren and I found out that he was
the barren area where thousands of years ago the mighty neutron bomb exploded.
That's really good, isn't it?
J is the forbidden letter of the Dalek language.
To precede a word with this letter is a great insult.
For example, J'Galcor, because Galcor means follow me, I am your guide.
So J'Galcor would mean follow me, weakling, I am your guide.
I like the fact that the Daleks have one word that means follow me, I am your guide.
Galcor.
J'Galcor.
How long does it take the technicians to build a Dalek?
Roughly three months.
They are very complicated mechanisms.
Three months is quite a short time when you consider what goes into making one.
Over 9000 different components and 11 miles of wiring.
What sort of weather do they have on Skaro?
Before the neutron war against the Thals, the climate was very temperate.
Since then, however, the planet has become a virtual desert.
How to say goodbye to a Dyke is very good.
The Dyke word for farewell is Zee Quiverly.
That means goodbye.
I presume that's what you say as it shoots you.
Do they have any entertainments?
In a way, yes.
Parades of strength, displays of new weapons, mock battles, etc.
Television programmes that deal with the glorious history of the Daleks, and micro books that
tell the fictional stories of the universe when the Daleks have conquered it.
It's quite nice that in all Dalek spaceships they have a little plaque on the wall.
Just to remind the Daleks what they should be doing.
And then you realise what Dalek really stands for.
D Destroy without pity.
A Attack without fear.
L Live without conscience.
E Eliminate without worry.
K Kill.
Kill.
And then the Daleks are supreme.
The Daleks are supreme.
I love the way they've got all that written on one plaque.
Just writing it once would have been enough.
They could just come back and read it three times.
But no, it's actually written there three times.
But I mean, there you are.
That absolutely sums up the Daleks.