Davros and the dustbins

My wife slept with a Dalek.

Sounds a bit like a spurious claim for intergalactic child support on The Jeremy Kyle Show if it did ever go universal, but it is true.

I should qualify the statement somewhat.

My wife worked at an International Telephone Exchange on the night shift and staff were allowed to rest up in a communal dormitory during their designated breaks. On her particular team when drowsing was a colleague who had, in previous employment, worked on the BBC TV Doctor Who series as a Dalek.

To children of the 1960's the Daleks were the first great horror experience on television before the watershed of 8pm and even today I admit to still being a bit scared and wary of them. This fear has been compounded in recent years by the realisation that the multi-coloured dustbins are now able to fly. Just going upstairs in a house had been an option for escape from the Daleks - but no longer.

After a few weeks of Obituary Announcements for those who played in part in entertaining and enthralling me as a child, including Ray Bradbury, Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey I now have to add to the death list the name of Raymond Cusick.

I was not aware of the man or his actual role in my childhood until reading about his conceptual design for the Daleks leading up to their first appearance on our screens in 1963.

His name will certainly have been credited at the end of each Doctor Who broadcast listings but I will have missed these from my hiding place behind the settee or under an upholstered cushion pressed tightly on my hot, flushed face.

A typical brief for a space villain in the minds of the under 10's age group, as I was, would include an electronic synthesised and menacing voice, an armoury of fantastic, noisy pulverising weapons, the ability to time travel and an intention to dominate the known galaxy. I would not have envisaged that these evil attributes could be carted about in a glorified dustbin on, initially, wobbly wheels as though a descendant of a pensioners shopping trolley.

The Daleks were required to meet a specification for a fictional extra-terrestrial race of mutants and Raymond Cusick came across the distinctive shape and profile apparently whilst at the dinner table. A demonstration of how such an influential race were expected to move was illustrated by the movement of a pepper shaker and the idea stuck.

There is quite an elaborate back-story to the Dalek race and I recall the involvement of the character Davros who was to my young mind, an inside out Dalek with liquid solutions and electronic probes keeping him alive and always thinking about his next evil deed. The best thing about the Daleks was their relentless quest to eliminate the human race and a group of us would, on summer evenings, after the programme but before bedtime, cavort about in each others back gardens making as best as we could the 'Exterminate' sounds accompanied by saliva filled explosive and destruction noises.

They were happy times even though we would occasionally scan the skies for any signs of an actual invasion force from space. It would not be all doom and gloom however for mankind. My Gran lived in a bungalow nearby and would be able to command a premium price from a Dalek looking for a manageable single storey and level floor living space near Scunthorpe, if it figured as a desirable location in their master-plan of galactic domination. Why not?