[T]he identification of the Daleks with the Nazis hardly needed spelling out. Most of the population had personal memories of the war and it was difficult to avoid the associations when the creatures lined up, raised their right arms in a stiff salute and announced: “Tomorrow we will be the masters of the planet.” Or when, in the second story, “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, they rampaged through a bomb-scarred London, using humans as slave labour, until their commander issued the ultimate order: “Arrange for the extermination of all human beings – the final solution.” As time went on, the parallels became more explicit. In 1972, humans who worked for the Daleks were dubbed “quislings”. And in 1975’s “Genesis of the Daleks”, we finally met the creatures’ humanoid forebears, the Kaleds; they wore black uniforms, clicked their heels and greeted each other with a Hitler salute, jerking the forearm up from the elbow, palm out.
This was in a context in which the Second World War provided the dominant imagery shaping the national identity. By the time Doctor Who was revived in 2005, 30 years after “Genesis”, Britain was a very different place. Those who still remembered the war were now pensioners. A new shared cultural moment had been found in the memory of the Carnaby Street version of the 1960s. The opening ceremony of the London Olympics underlined the point, with its insistence that British popular culture began in the 1960s, as though rock’n’roll were invented by the Beatles.
The Daleks now fed a new nostalgia. Their reappearance was heralded on the front cover of the Radio Times with a picture of the monsters in front of the Houses of Parliament, though the image had nothing to do with the episode it was promoting. It was a recreation of a scene from “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”. In 1964, the sight of Daleks in London had drawn on fears of Nazi occupation; now it evoked the Swinging Sixties.
Images of the war were to recur, however, most notably in “Victory of the Daleks” in 2010, when the tinpot dictators appeared with Winston Churchill. But it was revealing that the Tardis had landed in 1940: this was period drama, or at least a variation on it, not a living cultural experience.
Another significant aspect of the original monsters has also disappeared. In Terry Nation’s conception, the Dalek shells had been created to house the survivors of a war that had ended with the use of neutron bombs. At the time, the idea of a neutron bomb, which had been secretly tested by the US earlier in 1963, was much talked about and Nation was part of the first anti-nuclear generation, aware of the escalating destructive power of humanity. That the Daleks’ fictional creator, Davros – introduced in the 1970s – was so strongly reminiscent of the wheelchair-bound, deranged Nazi scientist played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove suggested that nuclear paranoia remained a preoccupation.