Review: Revelation of the Daleks

Back when BBC books had an open submission policy, its guidelines for budding writers made it clear that plots should always have the Doctor at their heart with his involvement being paramount to a story’s development and outcome. ‘Don’t just brush down an old adventure and plonk the Doctor in the middle hoping no one will notice’ they warned. Can you guess how this connects to Revelation of the Daleks? Yup, this tale is always criticised for the Doctor’s failing to get involved until the second half and even then there’s not a fat lot for him to do, but is that all that’s wrong here?

Revelation is generally held up as the best story of Baker’s short reign chiefly since it faces little serious competition for that title, rather like a tramp choosing to eat the sausage least past its ‘consume by:’ date. However for many it’s a genuine masterpiece, mainly because it’s grim, gives Davros more to do than just rant- though God knows he does plenty of that- and of course Graeme Harper’s directing so it’s automatically just as good as Androzani. Watching WHO from across its forty-odd years may tell us something about the changing tastes of contemporary audiences, but when viewing Revelation today, the series it most resembles is Torchwood - another show that equates body parts and stomach churning ideas with maturity. Who do you find it easier to visualise snooping around a hi-tech funeral parlour only to unearth cannibalism and space mercenaries - David Tennant or Eve Myles?

Of course there’s a rich history of black comedy in WHO but it’s generally been there to support a solid adventure with an easily followed plot. Here, Eric Saward seems to have built his script from chunks of things he’s enjoyed in the past (famously the source material is Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One) then hoped that including the Doctor will magically force a plot to emerge. What we end up with is style over substance; the notion that Daleks and fancy sets will be enough to engage viewers.

In fairness, many of the guest cast do a good job of making the whole thing far more watchable than it could have been, though the best efforts of Clive Swift, Trevor Cooper & William Gaunt are eclipsed by the astonishingly inept Jenny Tomasina's Tasambeker. How was she cast? Was it deliberate? Was she supposed to lend some sort of John Waters-esque camp appeal to whole thing?



Harper’s direction also has a decent bash at making it all look interesting but ultimately just draws attention to the fact that there’s so little going on that fancy camera angles and scene composition are the only things worth bothering with. Hold on, ‘...there’s so little going on’? How can this be when we have political plotting, cosmic knights on a quest of honour, grave robbers, unrequited love among the slabs and civil warbrewing between the series’ most famous monsters? Oh, and the Doctor wandering about outside awall.

Well, possibly that glib aside is the answer- the lack of direct Doctor involvement makes it difficult to care about, or even to take on board these other strands, and it doesn’t help that most of them are so poorly developed. While the various factions vying for our attention in Androzani cohered effortlessly as the Doctor raced to save Peri, here we’re asked to follow the schemes and agendas of characters who often seem to have been included merely to pad out the running time. When the Daleks themselves are reduced to this sort of token status, then something’s gone very wrong.

Of course when this was first broadcast fans were aware that it was to be the last new WHO they’d be getting for eighteen months (I won’t mention Slipback if you don’t) bearing this in mind I bought a then exorbitantly priced VHS tape intending to keep this no-doubt instant classic to get me through the barren times ahead. A few weeks later I had little hesitation in recording over it with ‘The Pink Panther Strikes Again’.

In 1985 this came across as a story aiming to snare an older audience, yet even at the time it seemed hampered by appearing half-finished and poorly thought through. Sure, it's an improvement on the disastrous Two Doctors, but knowing that it was followed by the catastrophic Trial of a Time Lord, this now looks less like the show attempting a fresh direction and more like another example of the series forgetting what it’s supposed to be doing, mistakenly believing that audiences will be happy with anything just so long as the Doctor or the Daleks pop up every few minutes.

Written by Phil Richards.