From the people who brought you Flight Through Entirety.

Saturday 8 March 1975

Genesis of the Daleks

Nazi Paraphernalia

Taranium Core, Episode 9
Sunday 11 October 2026

This week, Nathan, Peter, Simon and Corey are sent back in time on a mission to prevent Doctor Who fandom from concluding that the brilliance of Genesis of the Daleks is somehow not the result of the brilliance of Terry Nation.

Genesis of the Daleks was released on audio in October 1979 as an LP, a vinyl disc holding as much as 60 minutes of audio; the LP was the format that replaced old 78 RPM shellac discs sometime in the 1950s. It was also released as an audio cassette, a more compact and tractable format which became popular in the 1970s. In 1988, it was re-released as part of the BBC Radio Collection, in a two-cassette box which also included Eric Saward’s 1985 radio story Slipback, featuring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant. In 2001, BBC Radio Collection released it on CD, this time accompanied by a different radio story, Exploration Earth (1976), featuring Tom Baker and Lis Sladen. This CD version is still available from Audible UK, Audible US and Audible Australia as a digital audiobook.

Before it was a dystopian Twitter clone, Threads was a dystopian 1984 TV movie depicting the effects of a nuclear holocaust in the English city of Sheffield, described by film scholar Toni A. Perrine as the film “which comes closest to representing the full horror of nuclear war and its aftermath, as well as the catastrophic impact that the event would have on human culture”.

It’s hard to find online accounts of people reacting badly to the way Genesis of the Daleks disrupts established Dalek continuity (such as it was). But the locus classicus of being wrong about this sort of thing is a 1976 review of The Deadly Assassin by Jan Vincent-Rudzki, then president of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society; the review is now commonly known as What has happened to the magic of Doctor Who? You can find a copy of it here.

The first edition of The Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke (and Terrance Dicks) was published in 1972, and was the first non-fiction book about the show. It included brief summaries of all of the Doctor’s adventures to the end of The Sea Devils. You probably have a PDF copy of it on your DVD copy of The Sea Devils.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Genesis of the Daleks in Episode 35: Bring Back the Drahvins, released on Sunday 12 July 2015.

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Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, and Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social; Corey is on Instagram at @mcmahoncorey. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll use the tiny pressure of our thumbs, just enough to break the glass, to completely ruin your day.

And more

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.

Last week, the lads from The Three Handed Game released the second episode of the triptych Back to the Bassinet. It’s Mr. Teddy Bear, in which Cathy Gale tries to set a trap for a notorious assassin, using Steed as bait.

In this week’s episode of Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford decided to shake things up a bit by watching a really good episode of Deep Space Nine for a change — a high-concept but mostly technobabble-free episode called Children of Time.

Taranium Core, Episode 9: Nazi Paraphernalia (Genesis of the Daleks)

Recorded on Sunday 19 July 2026 · Download (78.6 MB)
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Transcript