Start to Finish - Curse of the Daleks

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

Wrapping up this short run of Start to Finish, we come to the earliest of the Doctor Who stage plays, and the only one to lack a certain something, a certain... how should I put it? Renegade Time Lord. That's right; 1965's Curse of the Daleks does feature everyone's favourite travel machine-bound mutants(1), but not a sign or mention of the Doctor.

Remember, remember the Dalek December,
With Paris in ruins and London an ember.
In times of the future, when fears are abating,
Don't try to forget them, the Daleks are waiting,
Silently plotting, and scheming, and waiting.
Remember.

Fifty years after the devastation of the human/Dalek wars, a series of accidents force the spaceship Starfinder, with a crew of three and carrying two passengers and two prisoners, to make an emergency landing on Skaro. The planet is ordinarily forbidden, but it's perfectly safe. After all, the Daleks were all destroyed or disabled, cut off from the static electricity that they need to bring them to life. Weren't they?

The Curse of the Daleks is a real oddity. In terms of plot is has more in common with drawing room murder mystery than science fiction adventure, with most of the first act devoted to the crew and passengers trying to work out who sabotaged the radio-pic transmitter on the Starfinder. The Daleks only really start putting in an appearance towards the end of the act, and do a lot of slipping in and out unseen, a feature which required adapter and voice of the Daleks Nicholas Briggs to add a substantial amount of narration to the play in order to stick to the mission statement of presenting the work as much as possible as written.

Most of the vanishingly small number of production stills for
the play feature their five Dalek models.

That mission is also the reason that the audio version retains quite so much of the intrinsic sexism of the original production. Of the nine characters (plus Daleks) two are female. One of these is a defrosting ice maiden, the other a scrappy Thal freedom fighter who goes all submissive every time her fiance - the gruffly heroic Ladiver - tells her to do something. The villain of the piece intends to use the Daleks to rule the galaxy, but also finds time to start work on a harem. There is even a painful exchange between Marion Clements and Rocket Smith - a character heavily inspired by Journey Into Space's Lemmy Barnett - on the wonders of twentieth century feminism and the brave new world of the 22nd century, where an unexplained ratio of one woman to every 7.5 men has led to women once again becoming a fragile 'weaker sex.'

The plot is almost insanely convoluted, and relies heavily on chance. As noted above, the first half is like a drawing room mystery, while the second has something of the James Bond about it, with its diabolical reveal and a denouement witha dashing hero rescuing captives from a massive industrial plant. The science is also bollocks, beginning with the Daleks' static electric power supply, to the retrofuturism of miniature tape drives and transistor-based radio-pics, to the claim that water can't boil at light speed, while a fire would rage out of control.

Which is not to say that there is nothing good here. The performances are excellent and the mystery element is intriguing, even if the solution relies on a scifi conceit which would disqualify it under the golden age rules. While flawed, there are also some interesting attempts at world building, including slave trafficking between Venus and Mars and left-hand thread screw tops. The sexism is distracting, not least because of the contrast with modern production values. It would barely have raised an eyebrow in 1965, I'm sure. More than either of the other stage play audios, this one is a curio; a post-facto record of a thing never recorded, notable more for its fidelity than its intrinsic excellence.

(1) And how rare is it that the results of radiation-induced mutation are depicted as hideous and debilitating?