John Noonan
When the Doctor Who serial, Power of the Daleks aired 50 years ago it would mark the appearance of a brand new Doctor in the shape of Patrick Troughton. Sadly, history was not kind to the story and after the BBC wiped the master tapes, the only thing that remained was the original soundtrack. Until recently you could only hear the story as an audiobook with linking narration, but now the Power of the Daleks is experiencing a regeneration of its own.
All six episodes of the serial have been animated using the shooting script and soundtrack, with a 5.1 surround sound restoration by former Doctor Who composer Mark Ayres.
Here’s Mark and Anneke Wills discussing the back breaking task of helping the Daleks rise again!
Anneke, for a lot of people who love Doctor Who, it’ll be a surprise that programmes like this just got wiped. As an actor during that period, was this something you were used to?
Anneke: We were used to it. All the stories we did for Doctor Who, we never saw them because the night that we were recording our stories, the other one was going out. And by the time, you later on would like to go back to them and have a little look, they’d all been wiped. In a way, for us, it was more like being in repertory theatre, where you do a performance and then it’s gone! It’s just how it was.
Mark: Television back then was an ephemeral medium. It was like a night at the theatre. It was something you enjoyed and then it was gone. Nobody thought back then in the 1960s, that there would be video, and DVD, and Blu-ray, and animation, and downloads, and god knows what.
Mark, you were the one who found the soundtrack to Power of the Daleks, is that right?
Mark: I was one of a team. I worked on Doctor Who as a composer in the ‘80s and I’ve always been a bit of an enthusiast. And I, like a lot of fans, were disappointed that that this stuff wasn’t available. So, a few of us went on a hunt for it and we were lucky to find people who had the off-air recordings. And we’ve even found some actual episodes. But sadly not for Power of Daleks, which is why we’ve done the animation. And I have to tell you, it’s great bringing these stories back to life. Anneke and I made the audiobook of Power of the Daleks a few years back, and who would have thought even then that we’d be here talking about an animated version!
When you say off-air recordings, this was literally people at home recording the television?
Mark: Absolutely. There was no video recording back then, if you wanted to keep something, to listen to it again, you just had to record the soundtrack and just survive on the soundtrack!
Anneke: Mark, is it not true that a lot of the recordings came from Australia? That there were Australian fans on their tummies, recording it from their tellies?
Mark: Well, some of them. When we did the audiobooks, one of the stories, The Space Pirates, a lot of that was an Australian off-air recording. [Power of the Daleks] was made off-air in Brighton. It was made on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, running at 15/16 of an inch per second. This is Dictaphone speed. It is half the quality of a compact cassette. It is astonishing it survived, and more astonishing that, to blow my own trumpet, that we actually turned it into a broadcast quality master, and made a 5.1 soundtrack that’s being shown in cinemas all these years later. (Laughs) It’s quite absurd.
Anneke: We saw it yesterday. It is amazing. The sound is amazing! And the amazing thing is that the Daleks are still as spooky as ever, if not more so!
And what’s it like to watch something you were in 50 years ago and to see Polly animated?
Anneke: Well, kind of weird (laughs) but luckily the ego doesn’t get involved because it’s one step removed. But what was amazing, I was watching it with the brilliant Toby Hadoke (actor and stand-up comedian), and there’s a moment where Patrick has a little joke. I was so delighted [with how it looked], I clutched Toby’s hand and said ‘Oh my god! Its’ beautiful!’ So, it still surprises me.
Can you take us through the restoration process and its place in animating Power of the Daleks?
Mark: Well, this was a, I have to say, protracted schedule. I mean, what has been achieved in the timescale is quite extraordinary. We were all working to the original soundtrack. So the first thing I did was a really good digital transfer and then made reference copies of that for everybody to work to. It wasn’t fully restored, but it was to time and to length. So, the animators set to work on that, and then I went to work cleaning it up and expanding it into 5.1 etc.
I believe Charles Norton (the director and producer) was working from ‘televisual pictures’ as well…
Mark: Telesnaps! Again, this was a thing back in the ‘60s. There’s no video, so if you wanted to record the picture, or the cast and crew wanted a record of the picture, there was a chap called John Cura who took pictures off screen, literally of the telly, as the program was transmitted. He’d take one or two a minute. We’ve got a complete set of those and you will find that about every 30 seconds in our animation there’s a shot that exactly matches a shot from the original transmission, because it exactly matches that telesnap from the show.
That informed the design of [Power of the Daleks]. It informed where the characters are. And then we had to work out how they get from where they are in one telesnap to how they were in the next telesnap. So It’s been a real bit of archaeology of trying to reverse engineer this.
Anneke: I just wanted to say, I’m listening to all the technical things, but how is it possible to make Patrick look absolutely as he was? All the endearing, sweet, crumpled quality that he gave, and there it is on the screen! And what’s more, I think his trousers are going to become a fashion statement. (Laughs)
Mark: (Laughs) We all love Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, we do. You can’t do an animation like this without capturing all those mannerisms. The animators have watched all his extant episodes over and over again to work out how he would visually effect a mannerism that we hear audibly on the soundtrack. And they match it up very well I think! These jobs are labours of love. I mean, all of us working on these jobs, we’re really lucky as fans. We’re very lucky to work on something we love so much.
And Anneke, what do you think Patrick would have thought about this?
Anneke: He would be completely chuffed to bits. Actually, I’ll change the tense of that. He is completely chuffed, sitting on his cloud going [adopts Patrick Troughton impersonation] ‘Oh, very good. Very good.’ (Laughs) You know, it was me that combed his hair into that style during those early rehearsal days; into that Beatles’ style. And he looked into the mirror and said, [adopts impersonation again] ‘I like it!’
In terms of doing the sound, times have changed, and you’ve been a composer of Doctor Who yourself. Were you ever tempted to change anything?
Mark: I’ve not changed anything! On the DVD, you ‘ll be able to hear the original mono soundtrack clean and restored. When you are expanding something into stereo, or surround, you obviously need to have something. You’ve suddenly gone from one speaker to six, so you have to have something to fill those speakers. So, occasionally there’ll be additional atmospheres and things, but they are all original. Everything is based on the original sounds of the production. It is all entirely authentic, as made in the 1960s. I’ve not added any digital 2016 sounds. Everything is extrapolated from that original mono recording.
Finally, what is the enduring appeal of Doctor Who? Why is it that 50 years on, we have these kind of things happening, and there are always new fans ready to enjoy the show?
Anneke: Magic.
Mark: Yeah, can’t beat that.
Anneke: And by the way, I get letters from young Australian Doctor Who fans. Which I’m very, very pleased about, because that seems to be a long way away. And they’re young, so that’s amazing. So, I’m grateful and I write back and say, thank you so much!
Mark: Yeah, Australia has always been so good to Doctor Who.
Doctor Who: Power of the Daleks is available from December 15, 2016
