A You Are Not Alone article I submitted to DWM back in 2008 which was turned down (though I made many of the same points again in the We Are The Daleks article in issue 471 in 2014).
For as long as I can remember, I had a Doctor Who poster on my wall, the one that came free with the first Doctor Who Monster Book. If anything sums up Doctor Who for me, it’s that poster. It has it all. Tom Baker as the Doctor. The Target books version of the logo. Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warriors, Sea Devils, Silurians, Daemons - and Davros, the scariest monster of them all.
One of my earliest memories is the cliff-hanger to part two of Destiny Of The Daleks, where the cobweb-draped corpse of Davros comes to life. At the time, I’d no idea the story was a sequel; I’d no idea Davros had been in the series before. For me, that was the first Davros story, and David Gooderson was my Davros. I know, I know, the mask wasn’t stuck down properly, they didn’t get the voice effect right and Michael Wisher was better, but none of that matters. What matters is that when you’re six, seeing a cobweb-draped corpse come to life is pretty bloody scary. So next time you’re watching the story, forget all about Genesis Of The Daleks, because for most the kids in the audience, that story was broadcast before they started watching Doctor Who.
But apart from
the cobwebs, what made Davros scary? Well, obviously, it has something to do
with him being half-Dalek, and Daleks are scary, but why’s that? If you read
articles about what made the Daleks successful, it never really explains why
they’re frightening. Instead you get a load of over-familiar nonsense about
playground games,
But
The Daleks are scary because they’re disabled.
Before you start slapping me in the face for being prejudiced, a few facts. Being frightened of disability is an innate childhood phobia. It’s known as teratophobia and serves a clear evolutionary purpose. Children associate physical abnormality with illness and feel threatened by it. The point is, it’s also something we grow out of, or learn to ignore. But deep down, we remain unnerved by deformity – and most film and TV monsters play upon this fear, presenting us with disfigured, and thus dehumanised, versions of ourselves.
To begin with, you have the way that Daleks move. They don’t walk, they glide, like people in wheelchairs. It’s the basis of the crap joke that’s been made ever since their first appearance – how do you escape a Dalek? By running up the stairs. But, as Terry Nation illustrated with Dortmum in The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, that ain’t much help if you happen to be in a wheelchair yourself.
This becomes even more overt in the case of Davros, where the lower half of the ‘Dalek’ acts as his electric wheelchair. It’s why every witless stand-up comedian will draw an oh-so-hilarious comparison with Stephen Hawking. Because clearly everyone who’s in a wheelchair is also an evil genius.
You also have the voice. Because that harsh, grating rasp we associate with Davros and the Daleks isn’t an ‘alien’ voice at all - it’s the voice of a human being who needs a mechanical larynx, a voice box, to speak. It’s playing on our fear that, through illness and by becoming dependant upon technology, we’ll become lose our ability to relate to each other emotionally.
Which is, of course, the point of the Cybermen as well. But the Daleks are more successful, because they not only have inhumanity of movement and voice, they have the attitude to match. We all know the comparison to Nazis, and certainly there is an element of that, but what gets overlooked is that Daleks are also scary because they’re a depiction of mental illness.
Watch the Whose Doctor Who documentary that’s on the Talons Of Weng-Chiang DVD, and once you’ve got past the fact that everyone in 1975 wore a polo-neck, you’ll find an interesting interview with a child psychiatrist who points out that Daleks are a good representation of autism. They have no ability to empathise - indeed, they are expressionless, so we have no way of empathising with them – and their behaviour is repetitive and obsessive.
As a child, I remember finding that terrifying. I remember, around the time Destiny Of The Daleks was shown, my primary school headmaster telling me I was mentally ill and should be locked in a padded cell. This was because I used to get into the most terrible, destructive rages, consumed with anger and hate. And I recognised that behaviour in the Daleks, because the Daleks are children, trapped forever in the throes of a violent temper tantrum. I think that’s what makes them particularly frightening for children, because they are being confronted with an emotionally brutalised mirror-image of themselves.
Davros takes that one step further. He’s not merely crippled; he’s blind, he has an artificial eye in his forehead, he’s down to one functioning limb, he’s even got bad teeth. He’s also incredibly old, which is another innate childhood fear – the fear of death. Davros is an ancient, emaciated, animated corpse – particularly in Destiny Of The Daleks - he’s the very antithesis of good health.
The problem is, what made Davros so thrilling for me as a child makes him, for me as an adult, quite uncomfortable to watch. I can’t help worrying that by playing upon people’s fears of disability, and using physical disability almost as a shorthand for evil – in the same way that in the tiresome Batman movies every villain turned to crime because they suffered from facial burns – we are contributing to the way society continues to stigmatize people with disabilities. I don’t know what the solution is, I said it’s difficult to talk about, but perhaps... perhaps it’s time Davros was left to gather cobwebs once and for all.
