Saturday 7 April 1973

Planet of the Daleks

The Back End of the Daleks

Taranium Core, Episode 7
Sunday 27 September 2026

This week, Jeremy Radick joins us for a desperate mission to a low-effort jungle planet somewhere in the northern reaches of Shepherd’s Bush, as Terry Nation tries to reclaim the glory days when Dalek stories took place on a more modest scale — full of incident and thrilling action sequences, but shot in a studio that had once hosted episodes of Morecambe and Wise.

Notes and links

Simon mentions two images from this story that contributed to our disappointment when we first saw it in the 1980s. They were Chris Achilleos’s action-packed front cover of the novelisation, and a publicity shot taken on the set representing the cavern where the Dalek army was kept in stasis. You can see them both here.

We speculate that cassette tapes might have been a thrilling modern innovation back in 1973, and we were very nearly right. According to the Wikipedia article, they were first invented in 1963, but really only became usable for music in about 1971. So it’s possible most members of the audience had never used one.

Last season, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds did its one and only Holodeck Goes Wrong episode, A Space Adventure Hour, which gives us the chance to see what a Holodeck Goes Wrong episode looks like in the twenty-first century and also takes an affectionate look at the production history of the Original Series. Oh, and they let Jess Bush use her Australian accent, which is pretty great.

The TARDIS wiki article claims that Terry Nation didn’t know that Doctor Who no longer used individual episode titles, and so he included episode titles in his scripts. James will be disappointed to learn that Episode 1 wasn’t called The Coma: in fact, the episodes were called Destinus (the planet’s name before it was called Spiridon), Mission Survival, Pursued, Escape or Die, The Day Before Eternity, and Victory.

The Dalek army was realised by using dozens of the popular Louis Marx toy Daleks and plaster casts of the toys that could be destroyed in the climactic special effects scene.

VidFIRE is a process that restores a film telerecording — originally shot at 25 frames a second — to the 50 interlaced fields per second of the original videotape recording. It was invented by a member of the Doctor Who Restoration Team, and first used on the VHS release of Planet of Giants.

The colourisation of Part 3 of Planet of the Daleks was made possible because the telerecording process accidentally included artifacts called chroma dots, which were interference patterns caused by the colour encoded video signal. Here’s a 2008 article from The Guardian that explains the process.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Planet of the Daleks in Episode 28: You’re Not Katharine Hepburn, released on Saturday 25 April 2015.

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You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

In this week’s episode of Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched one of Star Trek’s more embarrassing episodes — an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called The Outrageous Okona.

Recorded on Sunday 16 August 2026 · Download The Back End of the Daleks (69.8 MB)
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Transcript for The Back End of the Daleks