Exterminate…

Back in the early sixties they took the country by storm and suddenly every boy in the country was trying to make one. My first attempts involved (unsurprisingly) washing up bottles, bits of egg boxes, matchsticks, plasticine and paper cups. Somehow though the shape was never quite right, too round or two flat. Just how did you make a Dalek?

Of course it wasn’t long before you could buy them in the shops. I had a silver one on wheels and when you pushed it along sparks would appear behind the grill in the place that I always thought of as the head. Not that they had heads. Not that they had much of anything really. 

Just what was it that made them so menacing? Maybe it was the single eye on the end of a stick, or the sink plunger thing that didn’t really do a lot, or maybe the ray gun arm they exterminated you with. Or the fact that somewhere inside that metallic outer shell was a shrivelled and weak being of flesh and bone, like a newly hatched bird in a nest. Not that I knew that at the time. I think it was years after that first ground-breaking series that we saw our first inner Dalek.

‘Exterminate… Exterminate.’

Playtime was never the same after Doctor Who. Gone were the cowboys and Indians and cops and robbers became a thing of the past. We didn’t even bother being spacemen - no Bleep, no Booster, not even Robbie the Robot. Daleks were the thing.

'Let's play Daleks!'

What fun we had in the playground stiffly walking around with one hand with its first finger sticking out whilst the other was balled into a fist.

‘Exterminate… Exterminate.’

There was nothing else.

I remember an ad for blow up Daleks in the TV Times and my Nan had a pattern for a Dalek tea cosy, I think that she even knitted one. And at every fancy dress competition for years there were at least two cardboard box and tin foil Daleks, and they always seemed to win - even beating the cheeky chimney sweep and Bo Peep (with or without live sheep).

‘Exterminate… Exterminate.’

Ah, what fun those Dalek days were.

Today the man who created the Daleks died. BBC designer Raymond Cusick was responsible for the single eye, the rubber plunger, that killing stick thing, even the two lights (were they ears?) that stuck out of the Dalek's heads and seemed to be a different size each series. It was he who brought to life Doctor Who's arch enemies, and he who had every schoolboy in the country exterminating everything like there was no tomorrow.

Well done Raymond and what else can I say by way of a thank you but…

‘Exterminate.’